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Comment by mangeletti | Hacker News Reader

I was recently describing my thoughts about the future of big box retail stores to my brother, except it's not as optimistic as to project our current state of affairs into the future. I imagine, at a point when hardly anybody can afford decent housing, that a lot of retail spaces will be squatted as housing.

Take, for instance, a Best Buy. A Best Buy could potentially house hundreds, especially considering the vertical space (think bunk-style shelves for sleeping). I'm not suggesting this is good or that it would be comfortable, but we've got more than 4 million people working retail in the US, and retail is going nowhere fast.

IOW, in the markedly more dystopian future that I imagine, a lot of the same people that work in these big boxes will live in these big boxes.

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In my current city, I live in a converted clothing factory. Down the street, there's a building with lofts built in a converted department store.

However, these are old buildings with some interesting architectural details, some character to them. They've also survived being around for nearly a century because they were built with stone and brick, rather than the cheap structures that are often thrown up for modern retail stores. I can't imagine a Best Buy shop would still be standing in 60 years without serious dedication to its maintenance. Compare to the factory I live in that sat vacant for 40 years.

I've seen big-box stores that have laid vacant for decades and they're still standing. Steel and concrete make for durable structures.

In Snow Crash, intrepid entrepreneurs construct coin operated bathrooms adjacent to self storage garages.

I really hope we don't choose to do either one to ourselves.

Coin operated bathrooms have been tried, and mostly abandoned, because it turns out people just do their business on the street instead of pay.

The bathrooms in Snow Crash are full bathrooms with showers and such. Plus you can pay more and get the super-deluxe bathroom with plush towels and an attendant.

The freemium model might work for public toilets. Your first five minutes is free. The bidet function is free. Extending the door lock timeout by another five minutes costs $X. TP is $Y/meter. Tampons, pads, condoms, fragrances, etc. are available from the vending machines. Using warmed water for the bidet function costs $Z. Adding medications or fragrances to the bidet function costs extra.

The stall itself is robotic and self-cleaning, so one human attendant can service dozens of locations. The human labor factor is what usually torpedoes the economics of privately-owned public-access toilets, so if you can engineer the robotic functions well enough, your per-customer operating costs can drop low enough that you only need 1 in N to pay you anything to stay in business.

> The human labor factor is what usually torpedoes the economics of privately-owned public-access toilets

In actual practice the problem tends to be prostitutes using it as their workplace, IV drug users needing a private cop free place to shoot up, and homeless people.

Embracing those problems instead of ignoring them is likely to successfully generate more money.

Those use cases are why you charge extra to extend the door lock timeout. Prostitution and drug use isn't a particular problem as long as you can economically clean up their mess. Receptacles for unflushable trash and sharps should make them less of a problem. Squatters that refuse to pay only become a problem when they cause denial-of-service to (potentially) paying customers.

Back when bathroom attendants were economical, they were the ones that could chase out or discourage the undesirables.

I didn't mention this, but one of the robotic bathrooms I have seen encourages people to leave in a timely fashion by filling itself with water as part of the self-cleaning cycle. That program mentioned the difficulty in getting the squatters out while still serving regular customers.

[Edit for cousin post:] After the door lock times out, the GTFO timer starts. Don't be surprised if your stall fills with unpleasant odors (mercaptans) and sprays of cold water if you decide to try to squat in there without paying.

> Extending the door lock timeout by another five minutes costs $X.

Or a screwdriver in the latch. Don't underestimate smart apes.

The mental overhead of mathing out how much I want to pay to take a piss would prevent me from ever bothering with it, I think.

Living in self-storage is already a thing... https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/for-dcs-desperate-a-ref...

> I imagine, at a point when hardly anybody can afford decent housing, that a lot of retail spaces will be squatted as housing.

Or, as people have been doing for decades, they'll move to suburbs. And suburbs of suburbs. Housing is unaffordable in cities. Suburbs, not so much.

>I imagine, at a point when hardly anybody can afford decent housing, that a lot of retail spaces will be squatted as housing.

Typically residential and commercial areas are zoned differently. You can't just build a house, nor should you, on a strip mall or in an area that's unsafe for children due to four lane streets with high speed limits, lots of car traffic, no green spaces, no infrastructure to handle thousands of people, no parks, not enough sewage capacity, no public trans, etc.

This would just create another Cabrini-Green style ghetto. Lets not repeat the mistakes of the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes

You think there will be zoning enforcement in a world where people bunk up in a Best Buy?

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