I'm at Starbucks on West Tropicana and Decatur in Las Vegas.
When you show up in the morning, you can occasionally find a non-customer or two dozing off at one of the tables.
The restroom doors used to be open access, but now they've switched it to the code system.
I can't stand this, because when I get up to use the restroom, I want to know I can use it. I don't want to have to go on a witch hunt for the code first. Sometimes the staff is busy.
Often I try to ask for the code right away, so that I'm prepared (and then I may go into the restroom anyways and wash my hands or something so I don't seem like a weirdo who asked for the code and then didn't use it).
The whole thing is weird and conjures up a feeling of like I'm in middle school and asking for permission, and I don't like it. I don't want to have to talk about it before I take a leak.
If they were honest with themselves, I imagine many of the guests here feel similar.
So on one hand you have:
people are inconvenienced and probably end up not using the restroom sometimes when ideally they'd prefer to
people feel weird
the staff is frequently interrupted with the question of what the code is
And on the other hand:
- once in a while somebody who isn't a customer uses the restroom
Which is really the bigger burden?
I would bet I've almost never been inconvenienced by a non-customer using the restroom when I need it, but I know I've been bothered by the code.
Especially when you consider that a non-customer who wants it will usually discover the code anyways, it seems hard to figure that this is helping us somehow.
I think sometimes people feel like they have to defend against someone "getting one over on them" at all costs, when really you should just eat that as a part of reality that you can't control or improve.
There are times where it makes sense to try to be airtight against invasion, like at the airport. Even if it may be overkill that they take your toothpaste, it's reasonable to take inconveniences for the sake of avoiding really bad scenarios. But somebody using your restroom isn't that kind of scenario.
So it's funny that being blindly compassionate, like not even having any business sense or worrying at all about the Xs and Os of it, you'd probably accidentally make the best business move, that there's no need to fortify the restrooms.
Amoral games of strategy like poker and chess can be really deep and complicated. But in the game of life we're all interdependent on each other, and so it's essentially rigged to favor kindness and cooperation. So you can get really far by just leaning on what seems like the nicest thing to do.
And still they screw it up wildly. (I really doubt that the code system is a profitable solution. It's just some manager's paranoia about how bad it is when someone uses the restroom without buying coffee.)
It's excellent though that they've switched from segregated restrooms to male/female hybrid.
The hybrid restroom is really the only reasonable one. It's wasteful to make people wait based on what gender they are when one of the rooms is perfectly available.
And personally, coffee has a way of arousing my bowels, and if I want to take a few minutes in there, I like knowing I'm not the single point of failure that other people are waiting on.
photos are sourced by me originally, and it was awkward to snap pics of the restroom door and then walk away, but I did it