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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7767 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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The vibe shift continues.

Starbucks ends its ‘open-door’ policies

Starbucks doesn’t want to be America’s public bathroom anymore.

Starbucks is scrapping a policy that had let anyone hang out at its cafes or use the restrooms without making a purchase. The new rules are part of a larger effort to improve Starbucks’ cafe experience and deter homeless people and non-paying customers who have come to use Starbucks solely for shelter and bathroom access – but they reverse a policy that was put in place after one of the company’s biggest-ever PR disasters.

The new code of conduct, announced to stores Monday, is part of CEO Brian Niccol’s strategy to lure back customers, boost sagging sales and improve worker relations. It applies to all locations in North America and will be displayed on store doors.

The changes are a “practical step that helps us prioritize our paying customers who want to sit and enjoy our cafes or need to use the restroom during their visit,” said a Starbucks spokesperson in a statement. “By setting clear expectations for behavior and use of our spaces, we can create a better environment for everyone.”

Other changes include a ban on panhandling, discrimination, consuming outside alcohol and vaping, according to the policy posted online. Employees will receive training on the new policy.

Starbucks is also trying to incentivize customers to stay in its cafes instead of ordering to-go by giving perks for in-store orders. Beginning January 27, all customers can get one free hot or iced coffee refill served in its ceramic mugs or reusable glasses. Previously, the perk only applied to members of Starbucks’ loyalty program.

Opening restrooms and cafes to the general public has helped Starbucks brand itself as a “third place” between work and home and bring potential customers through the door. However, the policy has created challenges for employees and customers alike.

The open-door policy began in 2018 after two Black men were arrested at a Philadelphia location while waiting for a friend. One of the men said he asked to use the restroom shortly after walking in and was told it was only for paying customers. The incident was caught on camera and morphed into a PR disaster for Starbucks.

In 2022, Starbucks’ former CEO Howard Schultz said it might not be able to keep its bathrooms open, blaming a growing mental health problem that poses a threat to its staff and customers. That same year, Starbucks closed more than a dozen locations, primarily located in downtown spots, citing safety concerns.

“This is another example of the complications caused by the lack of public bathrooms in the US, and of Starbucks shifting its tune — benefitting at times from the lack of public infrastructure and being hurt by the same things,” said Bryant Simon, a historian at Temple University who has written a book on Starbucks and is currently working on one about public bathrooms in the United States.

I just had a conversation about this with someone a few days ago. I was saying that this event is what killed Starbucks as a brand. People used to actually go into Starbucks, and that rule was completely reasonable. Now, it's gross and full of homeless people. The bathrooms are disgusting. Their drinks are too expensive and not good enough to justify the cost. People used to like to go into Starbucks and hang out and read or study. A bunch of places around me that do enforce these rules opened up, including no dogs except service dogs, and they are always packed. At this point, I think it's too little and too late. I don't think they can get back to what they were before.

What's amazing to me though is that this was completely predictable as an outcome. How could it have turned out any other way? Why was nobody in charge able to see this and take the short term PR hit for long term benefits? Now their brand is permanently tarnished as a place full of homeless people. Companies can recover, but I'm not bullish on their prospects.

Starbucks in the UK is little different from our other major coffee chains like Costa or Cafe Nero. The cafes are perfectly good places to spend a few hours etc. lounging around. American Starbucks reads like it totally dropped the ball.

Like 10 years ago I used to frequently spend hours in a Starbucks, reading books or writing and getting wildly overcaffeinated.

I stopped in part because they seemed to be deliberately enshittifying the experience by replacing comfortable furniture with bare wood, and kinda making the overall vibe less inviting. Just felt like they were discouraging spending time there.

Reading this, I'm beginning to suspect why. My theory is instead of making a ballsy policy like they're doing here, they decided to just sort of passive-aggressively make the place less inviting in hopes the riffraff would stay out, of their own accord. Of course, that did not happen, but the good people stopped coming, so now it's all riffraff and no good people and the whole vibe of Starbucks is way off from what it used to be.

Somebody tell Brian Niccol to bring back the comfy chairs, maybe we can turn things back around.

Hahaha. The Bauhaus strikes again!

There was always a set of bentwood chairs,blessed by Le Corbusier, which no one ever sat in because they caught you in the small of the back like a karate chop. The dining-room table was a smooth slab of blond wood (no ogee edges, no beading on the legs), around which was a set of the S-shaped, tubular steel, cane-bottomed chairs that Mies van der Rohe had designed—the second most famous chair designedin the twentieth century, his own Barcelona chair being first, but also one of the five most disastrously designed, so that by the time the main course arrived, at least one guest had pitched face forward into the lobster bisque.

Though, in this case I guess it kind of makes sense, serving double duty to both look cool and as hostile/defensive architecture to prevent people from sitting there too long.

the second most famous chair designed in the twentieth century, his own Barcelona chair being first

The Eames chair would like to disagree. These people were so far up their own ass they didn't even notice huge developments happening at the same time as them adjacent to their own aresa. The answer these ******* would probably give is that the Eames chair was made to be comfortable, hence it had utilitarian use and was thus not suitable to be considered a work of art, making it unworthy of comparison to anything they were putting out.

Is there an objective ranking somewhere for "top five most famous chairs of the 20th century?" How would you measure that?

Don't know if there's a ranking but measurement is simple, you just show people a picture of the chair and ask them whether they know its name and then sort by most known. Can also do it the other way around where you show people the name and ask them to pick out which picture represents that chair etc.

Honestly the Herman Miller Aeron is very likely also going to beat the Barcelona chair in such a test, let alone this other "S-shaped, tubular steel, cane-bottomed chair" which I'd wager 95%+ of people wouldn't know of (even though they've probably seen it a few times in their lives). I dislike it immensely because it reminds me of sterilized metal hospital waiting room chairs (not the good private hospital types, those are more the Papa Bear Chair, but your bargain bin NHS hospitals).

My personal favourite design from that era has to be the Womb Chair though. It's extremely comfortable.

this article was published more than 43 years ago

Thank you nyt, I'd already noticed because of how funny and well written it was.

I stopped in part because they seemed to be deliberately enshittifying the experience by replacing comfortable furniture with bare wood, and kinda making the overall vibe less inviting.

Why did they think this would work, when one would imagine that homeless people aren't unfamiliar with sleeping on bare concrete?

The other reason they would replace comfortable furniture with wood is that it's cleanable, and much harder for bed bugs to hide in.

I just had a conversation about this with someone a few days ago. I was saying that this event is what killed Starbucks as a brand. People used to actually go into Starbucks, and that rule was completely reasonable. Now, it's gross and full of homeless people. The bathrooms are disgusting. Their drinks are too expensive and not good enough to justify the cost. People used to like to go into Starbucks and hang out and read or study. A bunch of places around me that do enforce these rules opened up, including no dogs except service dogs, and they are always packed. At this point, I think it's too little and too late. I don't think they can get back to what they were before.

I've always hated the times when I rolled into a Starbucks and it's packed full of homeless people, such that I have to do a 360 and find another place.

The only thing worse is when I entered a Starbucks and it appeared hobo-free, so I ended up joining the queue and buying a Starbucks drink.

It's funny seeing the civil war in /r/starbucksbaristas, between those who are relieved their stores will now be hopefully, finally free of hobos harassing and threatening them and their customers, and those who insist that letting Persons of Unhousedness hang out in your store and giving them free drinks is Doing the Bare Minimum and Being a Decent a Human Being. Very Decent and generous indeed, to voluntell your co-workers who you've never met in meatspace to volunteer your employer's resources to satiate your sanctimony and moral busybodying.

I have seen QT employees explaining that nonthreatening hobos who stay out of the way are sometimes given free drinks in exchange for keeping the, uh, worse crowd of homeless away. This is probably not what those baristas are advocating, but it is a reasonable case for giving out free stuff.

I’d question how well that actually works. The thing I suspect is that much like anything else feeding homeless people would invite more homeless people as word gets around that this particular QT gives out free food.

That's hilarious. It's like paying protection money.

The decline of rome in barista form lmao

To nitpick, it's 180, not 360.

It's a 4chan meme.

To nitpick, it's somethingawful, not a 4chan meme.

Early 4chan had a good overlap with somethingawful before SA turned into a pinko-sj hellhole.

Gentlemen.

In my region, every Starbucks I went to was not filled with homeless people, and was still a reasonable but overpriced place to hang out. I’m guessing this was more a problem in cities. My prediction is that they will recover, although at this point they are far too big and old of a chain to ever be “cool” again.

Being able to pop into a restaurant or coffee shop or bar to use the restroom real quick used to be a totally normal thing. As someone who commutes exclusively via public transit, I frequently find myself needing to find an available restroom wherever I’ve gotten off the bus or trolley. Some places still let me walk in and use their restrooms without paying; however, even the food court at my local shopping mall now has a lock on the bathroom door, requiring a code which has to be provided to paying customers by one of the food vendors. I found this shocking when they implemented it, but the reality is that same bathroom has often been closed for cleaning at very inconvenient hours of the day, usually because some homeless junkie has made it filthy in some way. This is just yet another tax which normal people are forced to pay because of the existence of a massive parasitic underclass of homeless. A normal middle-class person should be able to enter a public establishment and take two minutes to use the bathroom without impediment, just as a basic courtesy offered between human beings, but such a system cannot survive the proliferation of a class of individuals who are by nature abusive of that trust.

A perfect example of the tragedy of the commons in action. Amazing.

Funny story about this. The summer before I started law school I took a job painting houses. I was out in the sun on a ladder all day and, consequently, I drank a lot of water. I had just moved to the city and one job was only a few miles from my house, so I walked there. Well, I'm on my way home and all that water catches up to me, so I start looking for a place to relieve myself. I pop into a random bar figuring I'll just buy a beer if I have to, but as soon as I step inside I realize that something isn't quite right. There are no doors on the bathroom. And while a bar not having any women present isn't exactly uncommon, the men were acting a little friendlier with each other than one would ordinarily expect. Having never been in a gay bar before, I unnecessarily freaked out a bit, not knowing if there was some etiquette norm I'd be violating, so I glanced around the room like I was looking for someone before turning to leave. As I'm walking out of this place I see my ex girlfriend getting off of a bus. I just waved and kept walking.

I'm just imagining it slowly dawning on you like.

A normal middle class person can do that, it just takes asking. If you’re normal and middle class they’ll give you the code, 9/10 times. If you’re a wigger they won’t, if you’re homeless or look like a drug user they won’t.

Yeah, but standing in a line to get the code for the bathroom is still annoying.

I’ve found that this is only sometimes the case. I’ve had plenty of places give me the code upon asking, but I’ve also had a number of employees tell me it’s against their policy to let non-customers use the restroom. Chain restaurants seem to have stricter guidelines around this, probably for liability reasons, or just employees not feeling empowered to make autonomous common-sense decisions.

Perhaps this is a Texas-California cultural difference- it would be extremely rare for me, a non-teenaged white guy with a conservative haircut and no tattoos, to be refused a bathroom code, regardless of the actual corporate policy- and that policy is understood to be there so as to protect employees who refuse access to drug addicts.

Just dropping a couple bucks in the tip jar is usually enough

At that point it's probably cheaper to buy a bottle of water.

I feel like a lot of this could be avoided if we had paid public toilets, like they do in Europe. But those are illegal in America, so we rely on private businesses to offer bathrooms as a weird public service, and that trust can easily be broken.

But those are illegal in America

Is there a list of perfectly normal stuff that is illegal in the US? Today I learned that adaptive and matrix headlights are illegal there as well.

Paid public toilets were banned under anti-discrimination law- urinals were free(there is, after all, no practical way to charge for them) and so it was thought to be discrimination against women.

I’m sure that checking American building codes and construction permitting regimes will give you plenty of examples.

there is, after all, no practical way to charge for them

These did actually exist in the before-fore time. I can distinctly remember a pay restroom in a convenience store in the middle of Bumfuck when I was a teenager. I forget if it was 50 or 75 cents but it was entirely self-service. The mechanism was similar to the old-school washers and dryers in laundromats, IE, a lever on the door latch with two or three quarter slots that one pushed inwards to operate the latch and allow one to use the restroom. Comparatively speaking, a 16 oz bottle of soda would have been $1.25-$1.50 at the time.

At some point in North American history they cost ten cents, so my guess would be this goes back quite a ways.

Citation:

Here I sit, broken-hearted,
paid my dime and only farted

Next time when I take a chance,
save a dime and shit my pants

This is what Turkey has. I found it basically fine, it took about once for me to notice that I needed to carry a certain amount of change.

The convenience store at one of the major public transit hubs in San Diego still has a pay-to-use toilet that works precisely this way.

And I was wondering if I just missed the boats on pay toilets being outlawed-TIL!

there is, after all, no practical way to charge for them

Surely there is, unless you consider nearby bushes a urinal. You pay at the door that says "Men" or 🚹, before you reach the room with the sinks and the urinals.

Scott mentioned this in a links post years ago. A bunch of people campaigned to ban paid toilets, working on the dubious assumption that it would result in toilets being made available for free. Instead the only alternative was restaurants and cafés where the toilets were for paying customers only, and the cheapest thing on the menu is usually significantly more expensive than whatever the fee was for the paid toilets.

That doesn't help the issue of people with empty wallets and full bladders/large intestines. If there is no legitimate place in public where people can relieve themselves without spending any money, everyone else will have to navigate a bio-hazardous obstacle course on the side-walk.

My recommendation:

  1. Tax businesses who do not offer public bathrooms (defined as allowing anyone to come in, use the toilet, and leave without buying anything).
  2. Use the revenue from the tax to fund (a.) subsidies for businesses who do offer public restrooms (as defined above), or (b.) construction and maintenance of free-at-point-of-use public toilets.
  3. Once there are plenty of places where one can empty one's excretory organs without spending anything, it will be much more justifiable to take strong measures against those who continue to No. 1 on walls or No. 2 on the pavement.

Once there are plenty of places where one can empty one's excretory organs without spending anything, it will be much more justifiable to take strong measures

If it turns out that political considerations keep you from doing those strong measures, will you give the businesses a refund on their taxes? My guess is no.

"Part one: hurt people by making them do X, part 2: ameloriate the harm from part 1" is a terrible idea because it's easy to say you'll do part 2 without actually doing it. The most charitable scenario is that you're too optimistic, but in the real world sometimes people just lie about part 2 so they can get part 1,

If it turns out that political considerations keep you from doing those strong measures

...there will still be less excreta on the pavement, because some of the people previously doing their business there will now be using toilets. Even if it isn't a complete solution, we're still better off.

Part one: hurt people by making them do X, part 2: ameloriate the harm from part 1

My proposal isn't making anyone do anything. If you want to reserve your business's toilets to paying customers, I am not proposing to forbid that course of action!

Under the status quo, businesses are in a position isomorphic to the prisoners' dilemma:

  • if all businesses offer public toilets, I am better off than if none of them do, because there are fewer bowel movements on the ground.
  • However, if all the other businesses offer public toilets, it is in my financial interest to reserve the toilets in my business to paying customers, and thus spend less on maintenance.
  • If none of the other businesses offer public toilets, it is also in my financial interest to reserve the toilets in my business to paying customers.

Under my proposal, the extra taxes paid by businesses not offering public WCs would be reserved for the exclusive purpose of either directly providing facilities, or subsidising other businesses' provision thereof. (I apologise if that part wasn't clear.)

it's easy to say you'll do part 2 without actually doing it.

Hence the specific tax, from which businesses can make themselves exempt if they provide restrooms one can use without spending anything.

My proposal isn't making anyone do anything.

"If you don't do this, we will take some money from you at gunpoint" is making people do it.

All I see here is the Road to Serfdom. The further growth of the State by involving itself in all matters to solve issues it has created itself.

Why not simply relinquish the silly ban on paid public toilets and enforce the law as it exists? I'm sure

I guess that doesn't create thousands of jobs in the bureaucracy to manage the whole situation. But then if that's what we want we might as well get the benefit of that approach and empower the State to intern vagrants. Using state capacity to manage the results of not using it to actually solve problems is silly.

Why not simply relinquish the silly ban on paid public toilets and enforce the law as it exists?

Because I am trying to come up with a solution for the problem of 'providing restroom facilities to people who cannot pay for them'.

It is generally considered unacceptable (at least in the West) to put someone in a position in which they have no choice but to violate the law, and then punish them for doing so. As people do not cease to have bodily functions when they cannot legally perform them, there needs to exist places in which someone can exercise the Greater and Lesser Conveniences, even if they cannot pay to do so.

(I suppose one could allow private businesses to operate paid toilets, subject to taxation used to fund the free-at-point-of-use facilities....)

If you care so much about it, you're free to set up a donation fund and/or shelters that include such conveniences.

I don't see why the price couldn't be made so low as to be trivial even for vagrants, since, well, I've lived in places where that was the case. In the third world.

I really don't understand what makes people think it's okay to use violence to use other people's ressources to solve the problems they care about instead of just solving them with their own ressources.

Without arguing on the merits of this particular case, surely the answer is often "because I want the problem meaningfully improved, and I don't have enough personal resources for that". Or on the less morally pure side, "I don't see why I should have to bankrupt myself because everyone else selfishly refuses to do the right thing which would only cost them pennies each". Some pro-taxation people are idiots or hypocrites, yes, but trying to compel other people to use their resources in a way that you approve of is not in itself mad. I wish the Right were more open to it, they might achieve something.

Why not simply relinquish the silly ban on paid public toilets and enforce the law as it exists?

Because political forces that want to accommodate vagrants won't let you enforce the law as it exists.

They say it now applies to all North America, but I wasn't aware they had an open bathroom / hangout policy before in Canada.

I've never seen homeless people in any Starbucks, even though we definitely have homeless people around. It's always just crowded with early 20s girls ordering ridiculously priced drinks that are 60% sickly sweet syrup, 39% whipped cream and 1% coffee.

I’m in the US moderately often and didn’t see many homeless people in Starbucks in NYC, Boston, Miami or Seattle over the last year. McDonald’s was always (and likely still is) full of em, but not really Starbucks.

I've traveled a lot for the last year, and it's been like that at most Starbucks I've been to that aren't in really nice areas. And in the nice areas, they are usually empty and the people go to a local coffee shop. I've been to around 15 states in the past year too. Obviously, n=1, but that is my experience and the experience I have heard from other people.

I imagine it has a lot to do that with the same amount of money they get panhandling, they can have a decently filling meal from McDonalds, or a small drink from Starbucks.

I see a distinctly lower class crowd at mcdonalds, even in the same area, than I do at starbucks in my neck of the woods. It's entirely possible that homeless(who are basically all from lower class backgrounds) just prefer mcdonalds to starbucks, even if it's the same deal.

People used to like to go into Starbucks and hang out and read or study.

They're banning that now too though.

Never got any studying done in a Starbucks when invited there during college. Waste.

You just have to buy something.

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