the dirty lowdown

One of the many joys of restaurant ownership is the maintenance of the bathroom(s). For coffee shops and cafes, where the average tickets are low so that the customers can be many, your staff-and-customers-only washroom is in constant danger of becoming a Public Restroom and all that comes with it. It is subject to the worst deprivations of an already unsavory arena, and it is one of the most irritating and time-consuming of policies to deal with as an owner or manager. Filthy hygiene and drug abuse are the two biggest offenders, though I must say for a cafe in the middle of Downtown Portland that does not keep its bathroom door locked to the general public, our restroom gets far less abuse than I originally feared.

There was much deliberation, when we first opened, whether or not to employ 'the key' for our restroom. This is when a door remains perpetually locked and you must ask for 'the key', always tethered to a whimsical object like a spatula or a ping pong paddle. We chose not to employ the key system because we really did not want to be bothered with handing over this tool every 3 minutes throughout the day. We will use 'the key' for emergency situations (the occasional Rose Festival), and once it came in handy when a 6 year old girl locked herself in the bathroom and couldn't figure out how to unlock the door. We felt, and still feel, that our place is small enough that you can monitor the bathroom without making it an inconvenience for nice, normal patrons. We are, after all, selling coffee and beer. And for the most part, our honor system works. Plenty of parents with desperate children come to the door, with desperation in their eyes, and fearfully ask for use of the facilities. Hell, you don't have to be a child to need to use the bathroom NOW, and I would never deny anyone that service, whether or not they're a customer.

It's the twitchy guy with bad skin, accompanied by an even scarier friend, who I try to intercept whenever possible. Once every couple of months, sometimes more, sometimes less, someone walks in who you just know is going to smoke crack, shoot up and fall asleep, pee all over the floor and/or smear shit all over the walls. All of these things have occurred in our restroom. Although there has not, to my knowledge, been any occurrences of prostitution, so there's at least one more hurdle to cover. 9 times out of 10, we can stop people from disgracing our bathroom, but deviants can be elusive. Like the nice guy who would come in during a busy lunch period and ask for a piece of tinfoil. Turns out he was not wrapping up his leftovers in the john. And he got away with it more than once, because he would prey on a different employee every time. When we finally called his bluff, he asked if we would give him the tinfoil anyway and he would smoke his drugs somewhere else. Then there's the league of mentally ill patrons who though often very nice, can randomly leave scatologic expressions in their wake.

The reason why I am blogging on this heartwarming subject today is because we just initiated another employee in the importance of bathroom stewardship. As our beloved worker directed a tweaker to the bathroom door, Jeff and I simultaneously told him, "You're going in there to clean up after he leaves." Ten minutes and no sounds of ministrations later, after pounding on the door and asking our 'patron' if I needed to call someone, he quickly exited the cafe leaving a trail of stale smoke in his wake. Living the Dream!