Little Things
Here's a sign that was spotted hanging in the window of a Borders that's closing soon:
It's strange, because the public restrooms at Borders seemed to be a massive bone of contention over the past ten years. As the company started doing worse and worse, the employees seemed to put a squeeze on the bathrooms. Sometimes they were locked. Sometimes they were out of order for days at a time. Usually there were signs posted telling you not to use them unless you were a customer. (When does a patron become a customer?) And if they were open, you could count on them to be pretty disgusting. It wasn't quite like using them restrooms at a rock concert, but it wasn't far off, either.
The experience of a Borders store was not often terrible, but that feeling always fell flat on its face as soon as you started dealing with the bathrooms. It was the clear the policy handed down from on high at Borders HQ was to try and keep the riff raff out of the bathroom, and when budget time came, it seemed like one of the first things to go. The reasoning for this is pretty obvious: they didn't want their stores to turn into public restrooms that happened to have a book section.
Cutting the costs here seems easy enough, but for every homeless person or person that pops in off the street for no other reason than to use the john, there were probably ten other people who were just there to shop and needed to use the bathroom at some point. Trying to squeeze out the drive-by pissers by letting the bathrooms go to hell probably isn't going to work as a strategy, and at its worst, it annoys the best customers.
If it had been me, the bathrooms probably would have been the first thing I would have changed as soon as Borders encountered rough economic waters. I'm always amazed how much money some companies spend on ads to make their retail store seem great, but the restrooms are atrocious. In these cases, I just consider myself lucky that I'm a male and that I have the option of the urinal.
It's strange, because the public restrooms at Borders seemed to be a massive bone of contention over the past ten years. As the company started doing worse and worse, the employees seemed to put a squeeze on the bathrooms. Sometimes they were locked. Sometimes they were out of order for days at a time. Usually there were signs posted telling you not to use them unless you were a customer. (When does a patron become a customer?) And if they were open, you could count on them to be pretty disgusting. It wasn't quite like using them restrooms at a rock concert, but it wasn't far off, either.
The experience of a Borders store was not often terrible, but that feeling always fell flat on its face as soon as you started dealing with the bathrooms. It was the clear the policy handed down from on high at Borders HQ was to try and keep the riff raff out of the bathroom, and when budget time came, it seemed like one of the first things to go. The reasoning for this is pretty obvious: they didn't want their stores to turn into public restrooms that happened to have a book section.
Cutting the costs here seems easy enough, but for every homeless person or person that pops in off the street for no other reason than to use the john, there were probably ten other people who were just there to shop and needed to use the bathroom at some point. Trying to squeeze out the drive-by pissers by letting the bathrooms go to hell probably isn't going to work as a strategy, and at its worst, it annoys the best customers.
If it had been me, the bathrooms probably would have been the first thing I would have changed as soon as Borders encountered rough economic waters. I'm always amazed how much money some companies spend on ads to make their retail store seem great, but the restrooms are atrocious. In these cases, I just consider myself lucky that I'm a male and that I have the option of the urinal.