26
votes
The startup offering free toilets and coffee for delivery workers — in exchange for their data
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- Authors
- Daniela Dib, Faisal Mahmud, Zuha Siddiqui, Russell Brandom, Michelle Anindya
- Published
- Apr 15 2024
- Word count
- 1117 words
Ah there's the problem. Simple law to fix:
Any commercial building that has functioning toilets must let anybody who asks to use one, with no additional requirement.
Course Argentia is the neoliberal economic playground, so that solution flies in the face of free markets monetizing the problem.
Public restrooms can get quite disgusting. Having some barrier to entry helps reduce the number of times a worker has to deal with biohazard level messes.
Small price to pay to insure there's always a bathroom available. You want subways and busses to stop smelling like pee? Make bathrooms easily accessible.
I worked a gas station. There was never any real check to see if anybody bought something. I know how disgusting they can get.
With proper gloves, cleaning supplies (which should be there anyway), doing a quick spot check once an hour reduced 'giant mess' to 'small mess' for 5 min an hour.
Even if neglected all day it still took less than 30 min a shift to clean 4 stalls. With constant foot traffic for 8 hour shifts.
You don't let someone in a bathroom for whatever reason? Great, now the corner of your building smells like pee. Did it myself less than a week ago when the local convienience store said 'no thats employees only'.
When you gotta go, you gotta go.
In my experience, requiring keys or whatever did not correlate with cleaner restrooms.
My personal experience has been that these barriers actually correlate with bathrooms that are more disgusting, more likely to have run out of toilet paper and soap, and more likely to have fixtures in disrepair.
I imagine this is because businesses that, for whatever reason, cannot or will not invest in janitorial service favor introducing barriers to access so that the bathrooms degrade more slowly — but they do still degrade. Evenly barely-used guest bathrooms in private homes degrade without some basic maintenance once in a while.
I feel like the issue with them being disgusting is mostly because they don't invest in a proper service to clean it regularly and make sure it's not in a state of disrepair. I've seen some pristine public toilets. I've seen some absolutely horrendous "private, key only for paying customers" toilets. I agree that yes, public ones in general are more likely to have issues, there's no reason it can't be properly maintained. They just don't typically hire someone to do it regularly.
I think you have it backwards here. All that policy does is force business owners to subsidies the “gig economy”. Instead, we need to force these tech companies to stop hiding behind the “independent contractor” lie. They should be forced to provide restroom breaks for their workers. If they don’t like the overhead, they can pay local businesses to let their workers use those restrooms.
You're not wrong, but this problem extends beyond the gig economy.
Have a friend that does delivery and in-home services for Best Buy, as a full-time employee. They need a regular place to use the restroom too.
It actually benefits people who aren't participating in the "gig economy", like the homeless, as well.
On the other hand, I’ve read that pay toilets are common in Europe. I don’t have much experience with them, though. Do they tend to be nicer?
Much nicer. But the problem is that in some countries they are always paid. One euro every time you pee at a train station while waiting for your train adds up!
My go-to place for « free » toilets are the McDonald’s. The toilets there have locks and they write the codes on the receipts so only paying customers can access it. But there is enough traffic that people hold the door for each other so that not everyone needs the code.
I have found that a great option for public bathrooms in cities are hotels. I always ask the receptionist if it's ok to use the bathroom in the lobby and nobody has said no yet.
It's cause people like me, especially when I was young and dumb, won't hesitate to pee on the entrance if they say no.
I honestly thought it was common decency, but I guess that's possible.
imo they're nicer, but not nicer enough that I wouldn't outlaw pay toilets in a heartbeat if given the choice.
I think there are two issues with this:
I think such a policy (at least in isolation) will really make toilets rather unpleasant.
If there are only 100 toilets available now, but 600 people using them, that's 6x mess per toilet. If there are now 200 toilets available because artificial barriers were removed, that's only 3x mess per toilet. It's not like people are magically going to start using toilets more just because they're more available.
RE 1, they're already doing that. They'll grumble a bit at demand going up....but then that's the price of having a business open to the public.
RE 2: Provide more accessible free spaces for those activities (well less the sex i suppose, but that's gonna happen damn near anywhere...people are kinky)
RE 3: I'm betting if the toilet isn't relatively towards the front, there won't be much traffic except for emergencies. People using the toilet don't like being inconvenienced either.
This isn't really a problem businesses can solve, which is why I think legislation requiring businesses to operate their toilets like this needs to be paired with policy that helps make this less of an issue to begin with, like needle exchanges.
From the article:
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