Many of New York’ Starbucks stores employees are in open revolt after being forced to clean messes in bathrooms that have become the city’s de-facto public toilets.
An angry Starbucks employee wrote on the StarbucksGossip blog:
“I have personally cleaned up almost every humanly fluid and plenty that didn’t seem human.”
As a result, managers at some New York Starbucks stores locked bathrooms and put up “Employees Only” signs so the public could no longer used them.
Bosses from the Seattle company visited at least two of the coffee chain’s shops in Manhattan, and ordered managers to re-open the restrooms, the New York Times reported.
This doesn’t solve the complaint that lines of New Yorkers and tourists that cycle in and out of Starbucks bathrooms bring a host of nuisances, along with their full bladders.
“I am continually amazed by what people will do when given a few square feet of privacy,” an anonymous barista said on the StarbuckGossip blog.
“Why do you want to have sex in a bathroom? I think the toilet would be kind of a mood killer.”
Current and former Starbucks employees reported homeless people who use the bathrooms as their own personal showers.
An anonymous New Yorker calling himself “Mister PeePee” has vowed to pleasure himself in every Starbucks bathroom in the city and rate the experience.
Starbucks coffee shops are some of the few stores in New York that don’t sport a form of a “bathrooms are for customers only” sign. Even some tourist manuals recommend Starbucks for a convenient place for visitors to empty their bladders.
New York has only 20 paid, public toilets. By contrast, Starbucks has 109 stores in Manhtattan alone.
Jesus Diaz, an assistant shift manager at the store at 87th Street and Lexington Avenue, told the New York Times employees don’t necessarily appreciate the chain’s status as a public convenience.
“Starbucks is definitely New York’s public bathroom,” Jesus Diaz said.
“It’s a little too much.”
Starbucks came in for criticism from New Yorkers after a New York Post report last week that quoted an unnamed company source saying: “Starbucks cannot be the public bathroom in the city anymore.”
Starbucks officials denied the New York Post report, saying: “We’re not closing public bathrooms at all.”
In response, corporate managers swooped in and re-opened several bathrooms, including the one at 45th Street near Avenue of the Americas that had been marked “Employees Only”, according to the New York Times.
At that store, the bathroom door has a bare spot where the sign was clearly removed.
“I have to use the bathroom, too — and we’re selling coffee!” Matthew Shakespeare, a shift supervisor, told the Times.
“There’s no place that the city provides.”
