Quote: (04-16-2018 12:52 PM)RoastBeefCurtains4Me Wrote:
The solution is to charge for bathroom use. A small charge makes it worth it for businesses to maintain clean bathrooms, and makes it so non-customers in a busy area have easy access to a bathroom
I saw a show like 15 years ago about a sales guy that was trying to help a sportswear store that was having theft issues. They introduced various leave your bag at the front, only 1 item allowed in the change room policies, and followed customers around, but he still had issues, and then on top of that sales were down. He said his goal was to get theft down to zero, and the guy responded that that was easy, just lock the doors. Naturally he meant *while maintaining sales* but then it was pointed out that inconveniencing people like that, and treating them like thieves, hardly enamors them to your business and makes them want to part with money. Sales and theft go together and act in concert. Like gaining muscle at the gym and eating heaps, you will invariably increase fat as well.
The point is that you need to be clear what your goals are. You want to maintain a clean bathroom? The simple solution is to lock it. While charging for the bathroom might seem like a solution, you need to go down the lane of "and then what" several times.
Immediately you're likely to see a drastic drop in bathroom use. And a slight increase is money coming in. You're also likely to piss off a lot of long term customers to the point they piss out side, or even inside under a table on the sly. Flash forward a few weeks. Now people are actively avoiding your shop because it smells like piss out side, and you charge for toilets inside, so sales are way down. On top of this you need to dedicate more staff time to ensure they're spotless, because God help you if I or someone like me pays to use a toilet and its not so sanitary and squared away that the Virgin Mary herself would be proud to go in there and take a dump, because then I'm going to make sure someone earns their money mopping up my piss that will have landed no where near a toilet.
And this is why I find these actions so infuriating. They are not part and parcel of a decent, respectful society that operates for mutual benefit. It's impossible to draw hard lines, but if people are treating your shop like a free clubhouse and staying hours on end every day not buying stuff, fine, you have the nuclear option of calling the cops. Similarly, if you treat customers like shit, they're liable to not shop there, and use their nuclear option of upper decking all your toilets.
It seems there are lots of people here who only see things in black and white. "Staying 5 mins while not buying something is trespassing. These *criminals* are lucky they weren't shot, which would have been perfectly appropriate" Just like people who accuse guys of white knighting when they say that knocking a girl unconscious after she throws a drink might have been excessive.
The point of all this is that as a business, your goal should be to make bottom line profit. Does kicking out a couple loafers who aren't otherwise causing problems accomplish this? Resoundingly no. Even if only 1/20 is telling the truth about waiting for clients, the huge profit margins on sugar water and coffee flavouring more than make up for negligible costs of the other 19.
While they were within their rights, you're similarly within them to cut off your own penis then go get stitched up at taxpayer expense. This situation saw losers on every side except for the ego of the manager. (Guys arrested, cops wasting time, bad press for SBUX) These sorts of lose-lose-lose arrangements are generally easy to foresee, and should be avoided at all costs.