Local Grocery, not a chain. They have black dividers in the bathroom. The dividers are all scratched up with obvious anti-black, anti-hispanic, anti-gay graffiti. Not markers, but actually scratched into the dividers.
Went there couple weeks ago and graffiti was there, still there yesterday. I understand that fixing it would cost money and man hours and new graffiti will probably be coming soon, but when is it OK to just stop trying to fix the problem. How is it OK to offend your employees and customers?
It’s probably being done by young people who work there, not customers.
I used to work at a grocery store as a teen. The guys I worked with would make a point of being able to spend a lot of time in the john without getting reprimanded. And if they are in charge of cleaning the bathrooms at night (no way Respectable Adult Employee is working the closing shift) then the graffiti is there to greet customers in the morning.
One of the quirks of the store where I worked was that all of the signage looks like hand-drawn cartoons, and the store owner & namesake is depicted as a cartoon. One of the guys I worked with had amazing art skills and drew the filthiest versions of this cartoon guy.
Anyway…do complain to the store. I have no idea how it gets fixed. I think just more managerial oversight of the youngsters on staff. I think our guys ended up with chaperoned bathroom breaks.
I think most retail managers would politely tell you they can’t do anything about it.
Barnes and Noble is the only men’s room I’ve seen that ever keeps up with graffiti removal. Most others seem to let it go with just a yearly painting, and leave it at that. There’s one store around here that has a hand drawn pic of a guy getting a blowjob and a bunch of phone numbers on it. It’s been there since at least 2011.
I think that’s why places like Walmart have turned to metal bathroom stalls, which I guess you could still write on but it would be more difficult and probably easily wiped off. Another alternative could be black dividers but then I guess you could still scratch into it. It’s not the owners or managers fault and I can see how it’s a huge pain in the ass because if it’s a worker or regular customer they could continually do it every time they shop or stop for a few weeks or months and then start back up. It’s just one of those things, there a lot more important problems in the world. There probably is some clever and easy solution though that would still be cheap at least for big corporate companies like some dyed black steel dividers or something.
To the OP: how is a business responsible for what third parties write upon or scratch into its walls, so that it and not the defacing third parties are offending customers?
An Internet service provider is not the author or publisher of what its subscribers post or send. IMHO that’s even more so for the business washroom; deleting an offensive post is a lot easier than physically painting a bathroom wall every damn time some fool defaces it. Google Sisyphus for an illustration of the problem.
They already have black dividers. IMO (in an easier said than done, arm-chair manager position. Never give up. Just keep at it and hope the vandals give up. Maybe put a camera on the bathroom door and if they can pin point the time and spot them, turn the footage over to the police, if it’s an exact time each day/week, see if the police will wait for them (or call when they’re in the stall). In my semi-small town, they’d probably do this for us.
Depending on how bad the graffiti is and how many stalls there are, I’d imagine it wouldn’t take more than 20-45 minutes to have someone slap a coat of paint on it after it happens or even just spray paint the offending area.
I’d shy away from stainless dividers. Those can’t be painted over. They’re much harder to vandalize, but once they are, it has to be buffed/polished/etc out with an angle grinder and often times you can still see it there.
Eventually they’ll get tired of doing it and move on.
Unfortunately, cleaning up after customers doing stupid crap is part of the cost of doing business.
If an “artist” painted a swastika on the visible side of the building, the owner of the building would clean it up quite fast. You wouldn’t think about leaving it on the building. It would be offensive to anybody driving by.
Offensive material is being written within the building in a visible area. I assume the owner’s initially tried to clean up the graffiti, but at some point they decided that it was not worth the effort and cost. I just can’t imagine the management’s acceptable response.
Having a key to get in solves nothing, unless you are carrying out an inspection of the restroom after every use (“no, you can’t leave until I make sure you didn’t vandalize anything!”). If the complaints get to be too much, the answer is to simply eliminate public bathrooms (which aren’t required in most locations, except for restaurants).
I suppose you could get rid of all the dividers completely. The bathroom in one of the stores near me is just that. Five toilets and three urinals. All out in the open. If that seems too extreme, just get rid of the doors. People are less likely to linger when they are on display to everyone.
Personally, I’m more disturbed by the dried jizz on the walls than any racist/offensive drawings.
The same way they are responsible for collecting shopping carts from the parking lot so other customers can use them, and pick up the trash on the store floor left by customers. Taking care of the business is their responsible. If someone has offensive stuff in their bathrooms and they do nothing to prevent, stop or clean it up, then they are endorsing or encouraging the behavior. They have hourly people there being paid very little who mostly stand-around doing nothing about 25% of the time, they could keep a few cans of paint there and have someone put a top coat on it every time it’s needed. People only write on walls because they hope someone else can see it, but if that is prevented they won’t bother after a while. But sitting on their lazy hands claiming they can’t control it is complete rubbish.
