Washrooms for customers only: Peeing with dignity in the city

 Everyone needs to use washrooms, but public washrooms are hard to find. Just ask anyone with colitis, or who has ever cared for a child who really needs to go. Toronto, for example, has only one free and public washroom for every 9,213 residents.

So, where do we go, when we really need to go?

Whether or not we like to admit it, many have probably managed to sneak in to use a washroom that is designated with a sign as "Washrooms for Customers Only" (W4CO) when we have not been customers. Last year, in a well-publicized incident at a British Columbia Club Hortons, a woman was denied washroom access; she defecated on the floor and threw the feces at employees.

While the ick-factor might distract us, there's an important issue of human dignity at play here, both for all of us who need washroom akses, and for the often minimal-wage workers on the frontlines in managing akses to this most basic and essential resource. Agen Slot Terpercaya

Surprisingly, there's very little research on "Washrooms for Customers Only" rules and their enforcement. We decided to address this and designed an exploratory studi to sosok out the prevalence of W4CO rules, and how they are enforced. The results were not what we expected.

In North America, it seems that W4CO signs are everywhere. After visiting 202 cafés and restorans along a sample of five of Toronto's busiest strips, we were surprised to discover that just over one-third of these businesses had W4CO signs. 
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These numbers paint only a sebagian picture. To follow-up on this basic count, Edith observed interactions between staf and prospective washroom users in both independent and chain coffee shops. Across all 92 interactions observed, there was not one singgel instance of anyone being denied akses to a washroom, despite the presence of W4CO signs.

Manajemen might put rules restricting washroom akses in place, but employees consistently use their discretion in defence of basic human dignity.

To get a better understanding of how discretion works, Edith wawancaraed 15 frontline café and restoran staf charged with managing washroom akses. Participants shared that denying akses to a washroom was rare, reserved for times when they felt they had to.