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How is maintaining public restrooms a "massive liability"? Surely its an inconvenience but massive liability seems a bit of a hyperbole.

• lotsofpulp 23d ago
  Try hiring someone for a job where the job could sometimes be cleaning up bodily fluids and odors in a bathroom. Even the government deems it infeasible. Or, think about how much someone would have to pay you to do that job.
  • notact 23d ago
    Also: the liability of getting stuck with a needle.
  • leviathant 23d ago
    My first job was "stockboy" at Kmart in 1996, at 1996 American minimum wage, and part of the job involved cleaning toilets. And, honestly? If more people had to clean toilets in use by other people, maybe we wouldn't have so many folks expecting other people to clean up after them. I see countless posts in my Facebook group about trash on the street. In the time it took to take a photo and post it to social media, they could have picked up the trash and taken it to a nearby bin. But I suppose that experience goes two ways. Some people think they're above the human condition, to the point where they won't even clean up after themselves, even in their own homes. And other people recognize that it's actually not that hard to clean things up, if you just do it. We all have good and bad days.
    • lotsofpulp 23d ago
      Cleaning up trash, wiping tables, mopping the floor is one thing. Cleaning up bodily fluids, which likely come from drug users, is a whole other thing.
      • latexr 23d ago
        > which likely come from drug users OK, come on, you don’t know that. I doubt we have any serious data that bodily fluids in public bathrooms are likely to come from drug users. And if you’re cleaning it up, presumably you have equipment and are not using your tongue, the residual drugs won’t jump on you. Don’t stigmatise hard drug users, many of them (maybe most) were given a rotten hand early on and now want help. Policies such as Portugal’s decriminalisation have shown we can make a bigger difference when we treat those people as people. Either way, the point of your parent comment is that most people don’t even pick up trash, which is itself a problem.
        • mrngld 23d ago
          I do know that. For a time I was GM for a convenience store. I started requiring people to come ask me or the manager on duty for a key to the bathroom, which I started having locked by default. There was an immediate 90% reduction in bodily fluids outside the toilet bowl and 100% reduction in stolen plumbing (they were taking part of the p-trap for drug use) and in finding discarded paraphernalia. Correlation isn't causation, maybe all the crack heads were still using the bathroom but decided to be civilized, IDK, but keeping the bathroom under literal lock and key was a big benefit. It was inconvenient for customers, that was true, and I didn't like that aspect, but it was hard getting staff (or even myself) that had the will to hose poop off a bathroom wall. Which I can tell from your comment you've never done. "presumably you have equipment" Yeah, a hose. A mop and bucket. You're still in close proximity, you still step in it, it still splashes. And nothing prepares you for the smells. And you can never unsee it. I won't even describe the things I saw in the womens bathroom. Way less common for things to go down in there, but when it did... It's wretched work.
    • diogenescynic 23d ago
      The toilets you cleaned in 1996 were no where near as disgusting/dangerous as what the public toilets look like now from fentanyl zombies and meth heads. I doubt you had to worry about pricking yourself on a recently used needle ever. Those people simply didn't exist on this level back then and there were more options. Please stop with the 'I hiked uphill both ways' routine... life is worse now than in 1996 in almost every way. We shouldn't be expected to ignore it and just put up with it. People should stop making excuses for it and address the root of the problem.
      • alt227 23d ago
        Meth and heroin were massive problems in the 80s and 90s. Go and watch Trainspotting which was literally made in the year you mentioned and then come back and defend your point about public toilets in the 90s not being drug litter riddled. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB6rig1lYTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB6rig1lYTc
        • diogenescynic 23d ago
          Yes, they existed, but definitively not in the same potency (i.e. fentanyl) or volume and were more expensive and harder to get. Not every public toilet in the 80s/90s was completely taken over by deranged homeless drug addicts like it is now. The problem is much more difficult. It's not the same at all. When I was a kid growing up in the 80s/90s, you rarely saw homeless camps like they are now where they openly use drugs. You never saw public restrooms that were completely disgusting. Fast food bathrooms were clean back then.. now they are horrible. Things are not the same... The worst bathrooms back then were at the public parks where they were covered in pee and not cleaned well, but weren't destroyed by drug usage like they are now. I don't remember seeing piles of needles (or even one needle) like you do now.
  • miltonlost 23d ago
    > Even the government deems it infeasible. Because they are underfunded often.
    • lotsofpulp 23d ago
      If the government is underfunded enough to not be able to hire bathroom cleaners, how can anyone expect a barely surviving retail business to afford it?
    • mym1990 23d ago
      Funny how the government is "underfunded", yet can spend billions and trillions on plenty of things.
      • Loocid 23d ago
        The parts of government responsible for public toilets are not the ones spending billions or trillions of dollars on things.
  • mym1990 23d ago
    Yeah, I did this at 16 at a gas station and got paid 8.75 an hour, there are lots of people out there doing this type of work in the private sector. Its not glamorous thats for sure but supply/demand will dictate the labor market. The government doesn't deem it infeasible because hiring is difficult, its because they aren't willing to pay a reasonable wage for the work.
    • lotsofpulp 23d ago
      Obviously there exists a price at which people will do it. But if the government isn't willing to pay it, it seems unfair to expect businesses to pay it.
    • phendrenad2 23d ago
      How many likely Heptitis-infected needles and excrement smears did you clean up? per week or per day? Try 10x that and see if 8.75/hour is still setting your 16 year old mind with visions of dancing Super Nintendos and Segas.
      • mym1990 23d ago
        Go touch grass, you seem a little angry for a forum.
    • mrngld 23d ago
      I won't do your homework for you but there's people that have done the work of reporting out the numbers it takes to operate a clean government bathroom. It's not just "reasonable wage" territory. It's "civilization can't afford this" level expensive, the type of problem you can't throw money at because it's so bad it's obvious that the real problem and solution exists elsewhere. And it's only in the West that public restrooms are that expensive. Japans are less expensive because the locals use them like civilized people and they don't have enormous on-going cleaning and repair costs. So, the problem isn't in paying the cleaners. It's upstream. No pun intended.
      • mym1990 23d ago
  • lovich 23d ago
    Was a cart pusher at target and was frequently shanghaid into cleaning toilets. I think you might be giving away the class you were raised in if you think it’s infeasible to pay people to clean toilets.
    • lotsofpulp 23d ago
      I think it is infeasible because I saw restrooms become less numerous and more restricted over the past 4 decades. If it was feasible, the OP’s article wouldn’t be describing a real phenomenon. As for the class I was raised in, my parents worked 24/7, my mom cleaned 20+ bathrooms every day, and my parents, myself and my sister slept in one room until I was 16 years old. I have also worked at places where public restrooms were obliterated, and caused quite a bit of rancor among the staff, resulting in restrictions on who could use them. But that is neither here nor there on the current supply and demand of people willing to do that job.
      • lovich 23d ago
        >I think it is infeasible because I saw restrooms become less numerous and more restricted over the past 4 decades. Cool. My point was that I was a minimum wage worker and still cleaning toilets. Did it for minimum wage. There were many other coworkers doing the same. You said > Try hiring someone for a job where the job could sometimes be cleaning up bodily fluids and odors in a bathroom. Even the government deems it infeasible. That's only plausible if you were unwilling to do so yourself and couldn't conceive of anyone else doing the job. Its literally one of the lowest paid jobs there is. If you are claiming its infeasible to pay for someone to do that job, you are just saying you dont think that anyone should be paid to do the job.
        • lotsofpulp 23d ago
          No, I am writing that supply and demand curves can shift such that the job you used to for minimum wage is no longer a job one can expect to hire for minimum wage in Aug 2026. >Its literally one of the lowest paid jobs there is. Today, real life says that is not sufficient pay if we want more public bathrooms (in the places lacking them, such as urban, high density areas). My conclusions are not based on my feelings or opinions, but a simple observations of real life market trends.
  • nine_k 23d ago
    Given enough money, there would be people willing to do all that, buy proper gear and disinfectants, etc. But that would cost so much that most municipalities or businesses would not afford that. Some places, of course, do afford that; they are relatively few, as one might expect. Especially as people become more wealthy and the cost of their work grows.
    • CWuestefeld 23d ago
      As I asked elsewhere, why is it infeasible for government to do this, but Buc-ee's can have sparklingly clean facilities while still turning a profit? This might tell us something about the nature of government management or employment.
  • alwa 23d ago
    Doesn’t literally every bathroom need someone to clean up body fluids and odors from time to time? At the last gas station, big box hardware store, and McDonalds I visited in the West, log sheets hung inside the bathrooms indicating they’re supposedly cleaned as often as hourly. It doesn’t really bother me. At many of the places I work and volunteer, our norm is to establish a rota, so as not to shove the job onto whoever’s lowest paid, least experienced, or most willing to be bullied into it.
  • ang_cire 23d ago
    What are you taking about? Literally every restaurant and retail worker has had to do this. I was cleaning toilets in high school. You think restaurant restrooms are clean before the workers go in to clean them? You think people aren't shitting in urinals in Best Buy?
    • lotsofpulp 23d ago
      Obviously, it is priced into operating a restaurant, where there have to be restrooms. In the context of the comment I replied to: >How is maintaining public restrooms a "massive liability"? Surely its an inconvenience but massive liability seems a bit of a hyperbole. The labor costs of having a bathroom be cleaned (in certain regions) might very well be cost prohibitive, hence the OP’s linked article. For example, Best Buy has to spend money to keep bathrooms clean, whereas online only vendors don’t. Maybe it can make sense for Best Buy (or smaller operations like coffee shops) to not have a restroom.
  • mrguyorama 23d ago
    Every single front end employee in the new england grocery chain has cleaned the toilets. Every single employee in a fast food establishment has cleaned toilets, including the horrors you blame on homeless people, like shit smeared on things. Every single Circle-K employee has cleaned toilets. The cost for hiring someone to clean toilets is minimum wage.
• xyzelement 23d ago
  You don't see how maintaining a bathroom where the worst of society engage in public sex, do drugs, and shit it up in general - is more of a liability than without those things happening?