this post at Ace of Spades<\/a>.)\u00a0 Some have speculated that this was a set-up, for the men to have not made even a trivial purchase, and for their friend to have arrived in the middle of the arrest.<\/p>\nI am not particularly interested in trying to dig up the facts as comprehensively as possible, or to construct which version of the events is correct, and which version is based on speculation, or even to lay out what we don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
It strikes me that the key issue is this:<\/p>\n
A business approach such as a Starbucksian \u201cstay a reasonable period of time, use the bathroom if you look trustworthy,\u201d requires a lot of discretion.\u00a0 Managers and employees have to decide, when someone says, \u201ccould I please have the bathroom code?\u00a0 I\u2019ll make a purchase afterwards, I promise,\u201d whether that person looks trustworthy.\u00a0 Are they making this request because they urgently need to pee, or because they\u2019ll vanish after they\u2019re done?\u00a0 Is there a risk that they\u2019ll do something nefarious in the bathroom (e.g., various comments on news articles on the topic cite the risk of druggies shooting up in the bathroom, or, on the other hand, that a homeless guy will give himself a sponge bath in the sink)?\u00a0 And they have to decide, when people have settled in to using Starbucks as their office, how much time is too long, what kind of purchase is too little.\u00a0 Or, what\u2019s more, if a homeless man settles in, and you see that the smell of his unwashed self and clothing is causing prospective customers to walk in, then turn around, do you have the discretion to require him to leave?\u00a0 The whole model requires the trust of its customers that the company can apply discretion in a fair way.<\/p>\n
The alternative is also easy to see:\u00a0 rules.\u00a0 Require customers who want to use the bathrooms before making a purchase, rather than after, to buy the code for 50 cents or so, with credit towards a later purchase.\u00a0 Maybe let them skip the line if they\u2019ve got two quarters handy.\u00a0 Post signs about the permitted length of stay, and check receipts of those who seem to be comfortably settled in for the long-haul, requiring they buy another coffee or muffin if they\u2019ve been there longer than an hour or a half-hour or whatever your cut-off is.\u00a0 Avoid any dispute about not enforcing the rules evenhandedly by being vigilant about enforcement.<\/p>\n
Or, of course, Starbucks could simply allow anyone to stay for any length of time, and take the locks off the bathrooms.\u00a0 Again, my guess is that suburban Starbucks are wholly indifferent to length of stay, and certainly don\u2019t have any bathroom locks.\u00a0 But it\u2019s not particularly practical for Starbucks to become the destination for free-restroom-seekers in city centers.\u00a0 (Incidental reference to an old post:\u00a0 I prefer the more typical European system<\/a> in which they just ask you to pay, but then make restrooms more freely available.)<\/p>\nSo in the end, I don\u2019t really see a winning scenario here, once the discretionary system based on trust is eliminated due to taint of (possible) racism.<\/p>\n
Do you?<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Image:\u00a0https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/c\/c1\/Starbucks%2C_Universal_CityWalk_Hollywood.JPG<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week, two black men were arrested at a downtown Philadelphia Starbucks, after a dispute in which they, according to their and their defenders\u2019 telling, appeared to be loitering but were simply waiting for a third business associate in order to conduct a meeting, and did not make a purchase before asking to use the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":9131,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[617,45,956],"class_list":["post-9128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-public-toilets","tag-racism","tag-starbucks"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n