As a parent, I’m sometimes disgusted at modern society. Not on is it unwise to let your children outside of the confines of your own home without supervision (whereas when I was growing up, it was fine) but for ‘insurance’ reasons it’s better to have a customer defecate over themselves in a diarrhetic emergency in your store than it is to let a 5 year old use the toilet.
This link to the Consumerist explains it all – asking why Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory of Bella Terra/Huntington Beach felt they had to do this to a small child. For sanitary reasons more than anything, it would make sense to me to let the child, under supervision from an adult, use the bathroom facilities. How many dollars would it add to the monthly insurance payment? How much bad PR has been generated for Rocky Mountain as a result of this.
This deserves to be a meme.
“Insurance” is a dodge.
It is in fact, much nicer than saying:
“We understand your child is having diaper issues, but the truth is, there’s a significant chunk of the american public that can’t use a fuckin’ toilet in public. Ever clean shit off the walls? FIVE FEET UP? Ask anyone who maintains a public-accessible restroom if they have. Ever had a guest shit and piss all over the bathroom in your house, not tell you, and leave, so that you don’t discover it until long after the fact? Yeah. Happens to ‘public’ restrooms. Ever have someone shit in your sink? Yeah.
So we’re sick of it. We’re tired of having to don hazmat gear because john and jane q. public figure they can mud up a public toilet, and the bathroom slaves will take care of it. You want to know why we honestly don’t care that your kid is about to explode in feces? Because your peers in the public have taught us that there’s only a 40% chance *you* won’t leave that diaper and any other mess for us to clean up. So go ahead and yell and scream. But we’re done cleaning up, literally, your shit.”
See, “Insurance” is so much nicer.
It’s worse in clothing stores. Ask anyone who’s had to support fitting/changing rooms for more than a year and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that they’ve had someone take a piss or a dump on a pile of clothes they just tried on.
Women trying on swimsuits on their period, and not even having the decency to pay for the clothing they just ruined.
Do I feel bad for the woman? Sure. But do I understand and even support any store denying public access to the restrooms? Oh HELL yeah. People are pigs, and this is just one time where that bit someone else in the ass.
Oh, and when that woman “threw away” her kids clothes at the theater…wanna bet she just shoved them in the bathroom dispenser to stink up the place?
Somehow I doubt she was all that careful in ensuring she’d cleaned up after herself.
Always a ray of sunshine, John, always 🙂
😉
There’s always two sides to the story. The McDonald’s Coffee Burn story taught me that digging deeper matters 😛
I worked in a coffee shop when I was a teenager and witnessed the scenarios described by John… fragrant, to say the least…