Some business establishments are adamant that their bathrooms are for use by paying customers only. Presumably they are trying to avoid having bathroom expenses be any greater than necessary. Other businesses don’t seem to mind the expense, since more foot traffic tends to generate more sales; for every X people who walk in just to use the bathroom, one of them will end up buying something.
But just how great are these expenses? The average bathroom visit uses some water, toilet paper, soap, and paper towel, and contributes an incremental amount to the staff’s cleaning burden. Have studies quantified how much a customer’s bathroom visit actually costs a business?
It’s not that it costs them anything, it’s that they don’t want a bunch of undesirables (whatever their definition of that may be) loitering around the place and making a mess or bothering their actual paying customers. Or at least so they probably imagine, although there probably are places where that is a real issue.
What GreasyJack said. Basically, you don’t want a homeless guy loitering around in your store and scaring off paying customers. I make no judgments about the morality of this policy.
Or they don’t want paying customers to have to wait in line to use the bathroom behind people who didn’t pay. It would degrade the experience to have to do so.
I doubt that the actual cost is all that much. However I ride with a group of about 20 people on bicycles on weekends. We usually stop at a gas station and about half of us head to the bathroom. So there’s a waiting line. If one of the normal customers also has to wait, they might just take their business elsewhere.
I make a point of buying something if I use the bathroom. Usually I need some gatorade and a candy bar anyway. I feel it’s the right thing to do.
I don’t think the cost of bathroom expenses really enters into the picture. Businesses don’t want to become public bathrooms - having lots of non-customers coming into a shop takes attention away from serving the real customers, invites shoplifting, and deters some customers. The goal is to provide services for actual customers, not to provide facilities for the general public.
Also, occasionally the person wanting to use the bathroom does something undesirable in there (drugs, makes a disgusting mess, does actual physical damage to the room or equipment).
When I worked retail, we didn’t really want *anyone *to use the bathroom, customer or not. People do awful things to bathrooms - disgusting things, biohazard things and expensive things. It wasn’t that our customers were really any less likely to do these things, it was that if we could realistically say no to some of the bodies who asked, without harming our sales, the total number of people who might do awful things was reduced, and awful things happened less often.
Part of the problem is that public restrooms are so rare. If public restrooms were common, people coming in just to use the restroom even though they have no intention of buying anything would be rare – someone who is “just looking for a bathroom” is likely to find one near somewhere he actually wants to be.
But if one place has a public restroom and nowhere else does, then that bathroom will end up servicing everyone in the area who’s looking for a bathroom. Someone who opens their bathroom up to the public will not face a small incremental cost, they will get all of the pent-up bathroom demand.
As mentioned, the “average” person isn’t the problem. It’s the rest. And the women. Have you ever seen what women do in a public restroom? Disgusting barely scratches the surface. Men are paragons of clean compared to the average women’s room. Who wants to have to clean up that mess every 15 minutes?
A typical gas station/convenience store might only have one person on duty at any given time. Having to run into the bathroom to clean up means that the store/cash register gets left unattended for however long it takes to clean up. Ignoring the mess or letting the toilet paper run out disgusts paying customers.
Many of these places don’t have a full-time janitor on duty who might have to work a little harder. Someone has to neglect other duties to service the bathroom more often.
Well one time when I worked in a retail store a mother asked if her two teenage kids (brother and sister) could use our bathroom while she went next door for something. Being the nice person that I am, I said yes. Well I could hear the kids horsing around and laughing and going “Eww!”, then when the mother came back they stuck right to her side and shot guilty looks at me. When I looked in the bathroom later they had managed to get pee EVERYWHERE - splattered on the toilet itself, in the sink, on the floor, on the walls - I’m not exaggerating. It was disgusting. I was too grossed out to even look in there and I actually had to ask my co-worker to clean it because I nearly threw up.
People like that are the ones that make “no public washrooms” necessary.
They hover. Some ( a lot) of women are averse to plopping their butts on the seat, so they try to hover above it in a leg-shaking squat. As a result, urine goes everywhere. Filthy beasts, they are.
Maybe when they go in groups twp of them hold the third one over the bowl.
In the spirit of answering the OP, you might use about 5 gallons of water flushing the toilet and another gallon washing your hands (at most.) Those six gallons of water probably cost on the order of $0.004. Sewage fees are quite a bit more than that: on the order of 1.5c a gallon, so that’d be another $0.09. You might use a couple square feet of toilet paper, which would cost another $0.02. Hand soap seems to cost around $0.20/oz, so if you used 1/10 oz, that’s another $0.02. The paper towel you dry your hands with is probably about $0.01. So the marginal cost of another bathroom visit where you don’t fuck anything up is maybe around 15 cents, depending on where you are. (Probably less, since I assume they’ll be getting their soap, toilet paper, and paper towels in bulk. But there’s going to be some small wear-and-tear and water heating costs I didn’t include.)
