Storeowners should have the right to limit access to washrooms.
OF CAFÉ LOOS & THE LOWLY PAID
Let us add another entry to the growing list of rights to which every human being is apparently entitled. The CBC reported Sunday on Starbucks’ decision to allow non-paying customers to use its restrooms. The story featured reaction from York University professor Sheila Cavanagh, who approved of the move and “said store owners need to remember that everyone has a right to access a bathroom whether or not they are a paying customer.”
I have to admit that in my time working on constitutional law issues in the United States and Canada, I never came across this store bathroom right. I guess I got distracted by other entitlements, like habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence. But in my defence, these things seem to keep changing. When Canada’s Supreme Court conjured up a right to strike a few years ago, it was from little more than thin air.
To be fair and clear, recent events inform Starbucks’ bathroom decision. In April, two black men were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks after a store manager accused them of trespassing. If waiting quietly for a friend without buying a Frappuccino is considered trespassing, then they were guilty. But it’s not, and they weren’t. And when the incident became public, it was widely assumed (quite probably correctly) that if the two men had been white, their transgression of sitting there in the café without spending $5 on a macchiato wouldn’t have resulted in them being led away in handcuffs and sitting in jail for hours. One of the men had also been forbidden from using the Starbucks’ bathroom because he hadn’t made a purchase.
Starbucks may have felt that if it can’t count on its staff to enforce a rule in a colour-blind way, it would be better to ditch the rule entirely.
It’s a fair thing to do, and also a good PR move since the Philadelphia incident was reported all over North America: the confidential financial settlement the company reached with the two men wouldn’t have been enough on its own to quell the outrage. But ...
It’s a long way from a company’s voluntary decision to change its policy to concluding that all of us have a right to waltz into any store we feel like and use the facilities without spending a dime.
As anyone who’s worked retail or food service at a place with a customer washroom knows, there are few assignments more dreaded than cleaning the bathroom. This is partly because, well, no one likes cleaning bathrooms. It’s an icky job. But the aversion is especially strong in retail and restaurant settings because restroom users who know they won’t have to clean up their mess, or face the person who will, tend to be especially sloppy, gross, and disrespectful.
Limiting the number of people who use the bathroom — and maximizing those people’s feeling of connection with the store and its employees — is a perfectly logical goal for a store owner to have (and one for which his or her employees will be profoundly grateful).
And having a rule that only paying customers can use the bathroom is a perfectly reasonable way to achieve it.
The rule should be enforced consistently, and it doesn’t excuse differential treatment of people based on the colour of their skin. But conflating having such a rule with being racist — or conflating not having such a rule with good public, or even corporate, policy — is confusing and counterproductive.
This is not an “issue of public washroom access,” as Cavanagh terms it. It’s sensible and unobjectionable for stores to limit the use of their bathrooms to paying customers. It’s racist for stores to treat some people less well than others because of the colour of their skin, regardless of whether bathrooms are involved. Let’s keep the problem straight.
Frankly, I wouldn’t normally care whether academics are fussing over nothing — or the wrong thing. But I can just imagine this whole “access to public washrooms” idea gaining steam and leading to a call for actual regulation requiring stores to open their bathrooms to all comers (if it hasn’t already).
That would be a completely hamstrung way to fight racism, and it would be a real burden on businesses — particularly small ones that don’t have the cash to invest in extra employee hours for cleaning, let alone to pay for higher-rent locations where the safety of having a steady stream of noncustomers parading in and out would be less of a concern than in a lower-rent higher-crime area.
Let’s not let a lack of careful thinking about the problem of racial bias lead us to a slapdash policy decision that will do little except make minimum-wage workers’ lives miserable.
NOT AN ‘ISSUE OF PUBLIC WASHROOM ACCESS.’