Twenty years ago, then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was under pressure to build more public bathrooms. He responded with an answer that represents how most of the United States has handled public bathroom access for decades.
“There’s enough Starbucks that’ll let you use the bathroom,” he quipped. And in fact, private companies like Starbucks did step in for years to offer their public toilets as local and state governments essentially outsourced a public service to private companies.
Starbucks has at times embraced an open-bathroom policy, and shied away from it at others. Now, the coffee chain is effectively saying it can’t be America’s public toilet any longer. Last month, Starbucks’ interim CEO Howard Schultz said the company might not be able to keep its bathrooms open, blaming a growing mental health problem that poses a threat to its staff and customers. “We have to harden our stores and provide safety for our people,” Schultz said at a conference. “I don’t know if we can keep our bathrooms open.”
Starbucks’ re-evaluation of its restrooms highlights the pressing need for local, state and federal government to prioritize public bathroom access. “The commercial solution is really not a great solution,” said Lezlie Lowe, a journalist and author of “No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail our Private Needs,” published in 2018.
Read the full article on CNN Business
Authors: Nathaniel Meyersohn and Danielle Wiener-Bronner
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