Self-Deception and Breakfast in Your Bathrooms

This weekend I heard through a friend-of-a-friend chain of messages about a non-retailer who was travelling and stopped in to see a highly-recommended local game store. The visiting gamer had one primary takeaway from the experience: The bathrooms were gross. Of all the things that could have been memorable about this store, which is somebody’s livelihood, the thing that will be remembered by this customer is that the floor was nasty and the place smelled like pee. I wasn’t told which store was visited, but I’m assured that I would know the name.

“Clean your bathrooms” is so basic and often-repeated that it’s a cliche. Wizards of the Coast actually includes it in their literature about how to run a great Magic tournament. Why do so many stores fail to meet this very basic standard?

Cleaning bathrooms is not fun. It’s unglamorous and it sucks up time we’d rather be spending doing almost anything else. And if you think that cleaning bathrooms is gross, you’ll REALLY hate the mess you make learning how to manage people so that your bathrooms get cleaned regularly by employees.

Because it’s a crappy task and we don’t want to do it, our brains will convince themselves either that our bathrooms are not that bad, or that having really clean bathrooms is not important. But I think we can all agree on the following three premises: Having clean bathrooms IS important. Our bathrooms ARE that bad. Finally, something other than our own willpower and discipline is necessary, because so far our willpower and discipline have not been enough.

Almost nobody will do this, but the ones who do will have clean bathrooms: Next week, pick a random morning to come in early. You want to get this done early enough that your employees won’t find you doing this, because they’ll think you’re a crazy person. Treat yourself, and pick up something nice for breakfast on your way to your business. Let yourself into your store and lock the door behind you. Make sure once again that nobody is in the store.

Choose a bathroom. The worse or more frequently-used one is the correct choice. I think you know in your heart which one you need to choose. Don’t take the easy, more comfortable choice. That’s how you got here in the first place, remember? Take your breakfast into the bathroom and have a seat. Not on the toilet, you animal. On the floor.

Don’t bring headphones, read a magazine, or play on your phone. Chew your breakfast thoughtfully and contemplate your bathroom. Look in the corners. Look at the base of toilets and at the undersides of the bowl. Look at the disordered supply storage and the empty towel dispenser. You pay the same rent per square foot in this room as you do for your best-selling merchandise display area or your cash wrap. Many of your walk-in customers will spend as much time in this room as they will anywhere else in your store. Your regular customers and employees will visit this room five to ten times per week. Why are you here? How did you let it get this far?

You will not be able to deceive yourself about the state of your bathroom when you’re having breakfast on the bathroom floor.

I made a table for myself out of a box of drum liners. I’m not some kind of savage.

If you have employees, and you have a nightly bathroom cleaning checklist, and they learn that the boss occasionally has breakfast on the bathroom floor, they will clean your bathrooms. If you’re a one-person shop, you may need to put this on your calendar monthly or quarterly and commit to doing it on a regular basis. Doing so will ensure that clean bathrooms are something that stay on your mind.

Today was the first time I’ve done this, but our bathrooms are clean. Nobody has used this bathroom since my employees cleaned it last night before close. It was mopped with the whole store yesterday morning, and someone hit it again with a wet-Swiffer in the evening. A clean bathroom meant that this was a pleasant, though unconventional morning, instead of a gross time of self-shame.

You may scoff or laugh at me, but if your bathrooms are in need of more attention than they’re getting, this post is deadly serious. What is it that you do for a living? Why aren’t you doing the things that are required to make your store a great place for your customers? Do you want a successful business that improves your life and the lives of your employees, or are you farting around in your clubhouse until the money runs out?

Yes, eating a Spicy Chicken Biscuit on the floor of your game store bathroom is ridiculous, but it’s not as ridiculous as being the owner of a gross public bathroom.

2 comments on “Self-Deception and Breakfast in Your Bathrooms

  1. My dad taught me to judge the quality of a restaurant by its bathrooms. If the bathroom was awesome, the food and service would be even better. Same is true for everything really. You can tell how advanced a civilization is by what it does with its shit.

  2. I agree with Luke’s comment above. I’ve walked out on some restaurants for not maintaining clean restrooms. The cooks and servers have to use those same restrooms to clean their hands before making the food and serving the tables. If I don’t have confidence they can do that with a high-level of cleanliness, I’m out of there before a food-borne illness heads my way. The same principle applies to game store employees. I don’t want a demo or other transaction from someone who doesn’t have access to good hygiene throughout the day.

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