Planet fitness is a national gym chain. In order to enter the gym, you must have a membership. However, membership at one gym allows you to attend the other gyms. Similarly, Costco requires a membership.
By requiring members to apply, customers with a high messiness coefficient could be filtered out. This would leave customers with a low messiness coefficient.
This problem seems similar to me for hotels -- unknown customers carry a risk of messing up the hotel, raising cleaning costs. By being part of a national membership, this risk is lowered, lowering prices for all users.
Im sorry but who would in their right mind pay for a toilet subscription . Clearly consumers dont want subscriptions for everything, post covid loads of people pulled back on subscription model charges due to their clear over pricing on simple things.
If I buy something I should be able to use the bathroom free of charge.
I don't know how it'd map onto the model, but irl, homeless usually are local to an area and don't travel limitless distance to find a washroom. If they've got to walk more than a bit, they'll just pee on the sidewalk. This means that businesses in worse communities will remove their bathrooms to stop homeless from using them while nicer communities won't care
I don't follow this. In worse communities (by which I assume you mean, ones with more homeless?) doesn't the risk of the sidewalk in front of a business getting befouled increase their incentive to have a public bathroom?
If they're the one business with an open washroom in a 2 kilometre radius, all the homeless will use their bathroom. If no businesses have an open bathroom in a 2 kilometre radius, then the homeless will choose some random point in that radius to piss on, which probably won't be on their sidewalk. Tragedy of the commons.
Also, when I worked at McDonald's, the manager was much more concerned about shady folk doing drugs in the bathroom than they were concerned about people just being messy
Isn't the argument much simpler? Without public bathrooms, you see poop on the streets in SF. With them, you don't. So it's just a simple public goods problem, where the public good is "reasonably smelling streets".
Framing this as adverse selection is smart becuase it sidesteps the usual moralistic debates around homelessness and gets at the underlying mechanism. I've seen this unraveling play out in smaller cities too where one cofee shop closing their restroom triggers a cascade. The Starbucks policy shift would be a great natural experiment if anyone coudl get granular enough data on foot traffic and nearby business responses.
A possible solution:
Planet fitness is a national gym chain. In order to enter the gym, you must have a membership. However, membership at one gym allows you to attend the other gyms. Similarly, Costco requires a membership.
By requiring members to apply, customers with a high messiness coefficient could be filtered out. This would leave customers with a low messiness coefficient.
This problem seems similar to me for hotels -- unknown customers carry a risk of messing up the hotel, raising cleaning costs. By being part of a national membership, this risk is lowered, lowering prices for all users.
Im sorry but who would in their right mind pay for a toilet subscription . Clearly consumers dont want subscriptions for everything, post covid loads of people pulled back on subscription model charges due to their clear over pricing on simple things.
If I buy something I should be able to use the bathroom free of charge.
I don't know how it'd map onto the model, but irl, homeless usually are local to an area and don't travel limitless distance to find a washroom. If they've got to walk more than a bit, they'll just pee on the sidewalk. This means that businesses in worse communities will remove their bathrooms to stop homeless from using them while nicer communities won't care
I don't follow this. In worse communities (by which I assume you mean, ones with more homeless?) doesn't the risk of the sidewalk in front of a business getting befouled increase their incentive to have a public bathroom?
If they're the one business with an open washroom in a 2 kilometre radius, all the homeless will use their bathroom. If no businesses have an open bathroom in a 2 kilometre radius, then the homeless will choose some random point in that radius to piss on, which probably won't be on their sidewalk. Tragedy of the commons.
Also, when I worked at McDonald's, the manager was much more concerned about shady folk doing drugs in the bathroom than they were concerned about people just being messy
Isn't the argument much simpler? Without public bathrooms, you see poop on the streets in SF. With them, you don't. So it's just a simple public goods problem, where the public good is "reasonably smelling streets".
Framing this as adverse selection is smart becuase it sidesteps the usual moralistic debates around homelessness and gets at the underlying mechanism. I've seen this unraveling play out in smaller cities too where one cofee shop closing their restroom triggers a cascade. The Starbucks policy shift would be a great natural experiment if anyone coudl get granular enough data on foot traffic and nearby business responses.