Analysis: Starbucks can't be America's public bathroom

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/21/business/starbucks-bathrooms-stores-closing/index.html

by onemoresoop • 4 years ago

24 22 4 years ago

mikkergp2• 4 years ago

It's weird to think we should build a whole bunch more restrooms when in a city most every business on every block has them. It's really an inhuman thing to turn people away from. I vaguely agree with the idea that Starbucks can't scale to provide bathrooms for all of America, but it's similarly irresponsible for a mayor to defer to them. I think the ideal solution is require all commercial bathrooms to be public but also fix whatever is causing an overflow of people to require said bathrooms.

I often wonder, if I get food poisoning, what are really my options if a business says I can't use their bathroom. Shit on the floor?

Geonode• 4 years ago

I agree. And businesses are mostly cool with it. But the problem isn't public use, it's when the most unfortunate people do things in there that result in everything from from cleaning costs to remodeling. And take an hour to do it. If the governments would take care of mental health care we could all use all the bathrooms.

djohnston• 4 years ago

The people who need them the most are the ones causing all the problems. They shoot up, OD, harass customers, shit on the walls etc. It's their fault this isn't viable, and they aren't even customers.

Businesses shouldn't have to deal with them, we should install public toilers near city hall.

badrabbit• 4 years ago

That's not right. Why would a random business be responsible for cleaning up a mess random people leave in their restroom. That makes hiring harder and reduces business. The humane thing to do is to deploy a portolet every other block unless a city maintained public restroom exists. Pay for this with your tax, don't pass the cost to the businesses in the community because that will only cause them to shut down in impoverished areas that need their services. That means less pharmacies, grocery stores, cheap fast food chains housed people that are poor depend in to stay afloat.

mikkergp2• 4 years ago

You’re not wrong, and yet how wasteful.

smoldesu• 4 years ago

What are they arguing here?

And in fact, private companies like Starbucks (SBUX) did step in for years to offer their public toilets as local and state governments essentially outsourced a public service to private companies.

Starbucks paid for the toilets, the only public service being offered is sewage and water, which is not free and equally available to everyone in the service area. Now, if you think the government should pay for those toilets, I struggle to understand what the endgame of your argument is. Now every city has an arrangement of public outhouses, with maintenance staff that cycles between the locations cleaning things?

runnerup2• 4 years ago

Now every city has an arrangement of public outhouses, with maintenance staff that cycles between the locations cleaning things?

Yes because the alternative is human shit on the streets. I'd rather my tax dollars pay for public toilets because at least I can use those toilets too when I need them.

More generally, I often see this imagination that unemployed, unhoused, unfed people will just go crawl in a culvert and quietly die. They won't. They will find resources one way or another. A living human requires "x" amount of resources to live and them being alive is evidence they're getting it from somewhere. If they're not getting those resources from gainful employment or public/private charity, they're getting them from crime. It doesn't matter if you lock them up in prison, kick them out of the cities, tear down their shanty towns. They will continue taking a certain amount of resources from our overall economy (one way or another) in order to stay alive.

Our economy is paying for all these unemployed people anyways -- we don't need to force them to get really good at various types of "crime", we can just accept the cost and use taxes to allocate the necessary resources.

Or you know, we could just murder them all. But again -- people don't just quietly stand in line to be killed. The harder you make their life, the harder they fight to live, and you really won't like the reactions to ("natural consequences of") a policy to "fuck the indigents as hard as possible".

FFS I'm in the top 10% of monthly income in the USA and even I was homeless for 2 weeks just last month after a sudden divorce and often had to find a restroom or piss on the street. I also had COVID while living in my car which made me have a very sudden urge to piss every 2 hours.

refurb2• 4 years ago

San Francisco has public toilets but they’re used to shoot up so you still get shit on the streets.

ElevenLathe• 4 years ago

Now every city has an arrangement of public outhouses, with maintenance staff that cycles between the locations cleaning things?

Yes, because this makes perfect sense and is not that unusual in other countries.

Dracophoenix• 4 years ago

There ones that do offer it usually charge money.

krnlpnc• 4 years ago

Selling a diuretic without offering a restroom is such a dick move

toomanyrichies• 4 years ago

Is that what’s being proposed here? My understanding was that Starbucks will continue to have bathrooms, but they’ll be for customers only.

halfnormalform• 4 years ago

DARPA should sponsor an urban toilet competition.

eyelidlessness2• 4 years ago

1. The question of who should supply public bathrooms should not be predicated on an assumption that rampant homelessness is in any way normal or unsolvable, it’s not.

2. Wildly profitable businesses occupying nearly every inch of usable space directly correlates to the inability of humans to occupy that same space. The greater the concentration of wealth holding property, the greater the degree of difficulty for those without wealth to access property.

3. Government delegating responsibility for providing public services to private businesses by essentially doing nothing and letting them fill the space guarantees that they’ll fill the space in the way which most benefits them.

4. That doesn’t mean that it’s sensible to expect nothing of businesses in contribution to public services. Businesses enjoy a wide array of benefits, many of which are scarce, from being licensed by their various jurisdictions.

5. Rampant homelessness is solvable. Solutions are known (housing first). Governments don’t pursue known solutions because they lack either political will or resources or both.

6. Solving homelessness should be a predicate for discussion of public service provisions so long as provision of public services is predicated on rampant homelessness and issues that arise around it. Any discussion around this which doesn’t have systemic goals, and which isn’t an emergency response which wouldn’t be better suited by systemic goals, is reinforcing rampant homelessness.

7. Businesses which enjoy such largess are morally responsible for the largess humans cannot enjoy as a consequence. They should be responsible for redressing that.

8. That doesn’t mean they should be de facto providers of public services. To the extent they are, that function should be codified as public services and separated from their businesses accounting.

9. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t provide services. They should, until such a time as their largess affords access to property and livelihood sufficient to solve rampant homelessness. A reasonable way to square that is by taxing businesses for the benefits they derive from doing business and holding exclusive access to resources which enable that.

10. If any of that seems unachievable pragmatically or politically, the groundwork for this has been laid in Washington state and Utah. Housing people first eliminates chronic homelessness.

11. This should be 1a. We still need public bathrooms. It’s a basic accessibility issue, not only but especially for many people with disabilities.

adlorger• 4 years ago

Your formatting got me to read every line of what you wrote, even though I only agree with about half of your thesies

eyelidlessness2• 4 years ago

Nice! Most people don’t read any of my lists. You can thank my puppy for the formatting. Normally I just write lists then edit for human consumption, but I skipped the edit so I could feed/walk/play with my gorl.

polski-g• 4 years ago

If you aren't willing to commit the mentally ill (homeless) to insane asylums, you can't expect private businesses to leave their property open to non paying traffic.

Analysis: Starbucks can't be America's public bathroom

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