Why in Hong Kong people choose to sleep at McDonald's instead of going home | Hacker News Reader

Why in Hong Kong people choose to sleep at McDonald's instead of going home

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92 pointsgscott58 comments

A store manager (in Norway) once told me that they had a policy to never kick people out, regardless of being paying guests or not. He said this was a policy coming from top down and that they never refused anyone to use the toilet, WiFi or power outlets.

But they never spoke publicly about it, since they didn't want too much press about it. But knowing this put the chain in a different light for me. Seeing people just sitting around reminds me of it. It's a good reminder me that corporations aren't just good or bad.

Have you wondered how much marketing goes into the smell of McDonalds? It's a mind corrupting scent and they want to spread it because marketing is even more their core business than actually feeding people. It's feeding in as much as pop soda is hydration.

>Have you wondered how much marketing goes into the smell of McDonalds?

It smells terrible so I don't get it. Is there a component of triggering addicts like how smokers like the burning cat shit smell of cigarettes?

Ah, I smell a mind corrupting comment right there. Are you literally shaking right now because of the smell of a McDonalds? Come on at least try to have facts or at leastt an argument instead of just hate.

This mind corrupting comment induced me to find the closest McDonalds and eat there though.

how is that even legal or morally acceptable. What a terrible situation

> It's a good reminder me that corporations aren't just good or bad.

Do you think they do it to be good? Do you think they would have been bad if they had kicked out non-paying customers?

I think its one of the few places where the profit motive aligns to be somewhat lawful neutral if not lawful good.

McDonald's was one of the first businesses to realize that on the Interstates you get all sorts of weary travelers at various states in their journeys. Some may only need a quick restroom trip. But just making that restroom trip makes them a captive audience to maybe buy a snack they didn't intend to. Or that goodwill of offering a quick restroom stop at one of the trip makes it more likely the customer will return for a meal at the other end of the trip.

McDonald's expanded so rapidly down the US interstates for just this reason, so its interesting that that remains a core value to corporate even knowing that there are plenty more options when travelling than when McDonald's was first starting out.

I know anecdotally so many people that still look for those golden arches when in need of a quick leg stretch or a restroom break on a long drive.

Free air-con and free water. In HK, some subdividing landlords charge tenants for electricity for ~10x the price of the power company, which really should be made an illegal practice.

It is illegal, the government is just not very good at enforcing laws which protect the poor.

Same in the US, of course.

We just have a privatized legal system whereby hotshot attorneys may consider certain pursuits if determined lucrative, and a privatized criminal justice system that favors locking people in concrete cubes for large chunks of their lives.

There’s nothing more humane about it. The effect is merely that “poor people” become “bad people”, “rich people” becomes “heroes”, and suddenly everybody got what they deserved.

Adding to that...

You have illegal structure on many, many rooftops in the city (i.e.: slums). Those are very easy to spot, as there is always a higher tower being built from which to look down on those.

They are rented, and despite being super illegal, they are contracted with leases and stamp duty and everything. This is next level of slumlords.

Huh, price control?

McDonald's are like public utilities: you get wifi, electrical outlets, seats, air conditioning, bathrooms. All for the admission price of a $1 meal.

I used to refer to them as American Embassies when traveling. If you're lost, tired, hot, thirsty, hungry, have to use the bathroom and don't have change for a public WC but you stumble on a McDonald's, they'll have all the amenities you mention and often a map of the surrounding area.

The (slightly more) premium version is Starbucks, which has all the above but is more likely to have a clean bathroom. Also more importantly, somehow Starbucks more reliably has WiFi you can connect to without having a working phone number to authenticate, which was a huge problem in Switzerland (I tried a McDonalds first, too, but needed a phone number).

All of the Starbucks I visited in Europe had locks on the bathrooms.

McDonald's in Patong, Thailand has no toilet (we went there last night). Not sure if lack of toilet is common here, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Different countries and cities have different practices concerning what you get. Across the border in mainland China, the toilets will often be cordoned off for months at a time, and they skimp on providing decent air-con. In Tokyo, they throw everyone out from 2am to 5am for "cleaning".

I once went to a McDonald's in Amsterdam. You had to pay to use the restroom and there was a person standing at the door who would hand you a 12 inch strip of toilet paper. God knows what you were supposed to do if you actually needed more. From my experience in dozens of other McDonald's restaurants, I was stunned to see this.

That sounds very strange; was it queens day or something else special?

I love this, definitely treated one of the McDonald'ses in downtown Stockholm exactly like this on a trip last week. All my meals were, like, $10+ there, but hey, it's Scandinavia, I'll take it. (The truffle onion burger and sweet potato fries were amazing btw.)

> Researchers were able to interview 53 McRefugees

> McRefugees

Well, that's an interesting term..

Is it real? I never saw one doing that. If its real then I know why. Rooms in Hong Kong are like matchbox size and smelly. McD is a better place to sleep I guess.

Of Coz it is and has been for years. I once did for a few weeks.

Can you tell me more about it? I’m curious to as why McD let’s you sleep in the restaurant, here they would just kick you out.

These McDonald opens 24 hours, so it is not like they are sleeping inside while the store are closed.

Most of these people comes in very late, after 22:00 or even later at 24:00. They watch some video on their phones for an hour or so before sitting there falling to sleep.

Since most of the overnight business are take away, so seats are rarely needed by customers.

In Income / Big Mac price model, McDonald in HK are one of the cheapest if not the cheapest in the world.

However they do kick you out if you smells bad, i.e causing disturbance to other customers.

I wish I could do something to help Hong Kong, but like most people here, we felt pretty much powerless.

Very real, There was a McD across the street from my hotel in Mong Kok (actually Tai Kok Tsui but hotel claimed it was Mong Kok). Often saw people spending the night in the McD, mostly older women. Rooms can be very small in HK but I rarely found them smelly but they can get pricy.

The article talks about a lawyer with a 292 sq ft apartment that cost $760k

292 sq ft!

≈ 27 ㎡ @ €657k

I'm confused. How is sleeping on a chair better than sleeping in the smallest, dirtiest apartment, but on a bed?

Did you read the article? It's paragraphs 6 and 7.

You have to pay much more to rent the apartment containing the bed?

The article notes that many of them have apartments. It sounds like they are already paying.

They are paying but it's 34°C and 80-100% humidity currently in HK. A lot of these subdivided flats don't have proper access to air conditioning units.

An amusing few paragraph in this context:

[...]

REASONS FOR AND BENEFITS OF THE ACQUISITION AND THE [MCDONALD's] FRANCHISE

CITIC is China’s largest conglomerate operating domestically and overseas, with businesses in financial services, resources and energy, manufacturing, engineering contracting and real estate as well as others. CITIC is a constituent of the Hang Seng Index . China’s consumer sector is growing rapidly, benefiting from continued urbanization, an expanding middle class and increasing disposable household incomes. China’s working population is larger than those of the US and Europe combined, yet spending levels of China’s middle class are a small fraction of those in more developed countries. As disposable incomes rise, people will continue to spend more on leisure and on dining out, and there is particularly great growth potential in tier 3 and 4 cities. As such, the market for Western Quick Service Restaurants is expected to continue to grow rapidly. This investment offers a chance to deepen CITIC’s exposure to the consumer sector, which is poised to be the main driver of China’s economy for decades to come. This transaction is also another step in CITIC’s efforts to better balance the financial and non-financial businesses.

CITIC sees opportunities for synergies with its existing businesses. McDonald’s extensive network and consumer base will provide CITIC with invaluable insight, which CITIC will leverage to the benefit of its existing businesses.

[...]

http://www.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2017/0109/LT...

Happy Donuts in Palo Alto and Safeway in Menlo Park and Mountain View on El Camino have a similar phenomenon but it’s usually only students whom have a place but sleep while studying.

There are many more homeless people whom have no options for housing or refused Section 8, and so seek shelter during heat of summer days or less frequent cold winter nights.

There must a nonzero fraction of thousands whom consciously choose to be leather tramps and live rough... not all homeless people are in unfortunate circumstances, crazy, on drugs, criminals, peter pan’s or defective. You’re reading from a rubber tramp right now. :)

I guess HK has no social housing? The free market has no ethics or compassion so the government has to make rules.

It has, and a lot (in comparison to America.) Just not enough for everybody.

Believe me or not, some of those 50-60 storey high apartment blocks have double digit vacancy rates, being bought as investment property.

There are multiple laws imposing symbolic taxes on vacant flats, but even they are not enforced.

Once on my memory, HK govt had a crazy idea to "dump all homeless people to Shenzhen," but they were given middle finger by previous mayor, (one that went in front of firing squad.) with a dismissive comment "send your millionaires instead"

And HK has been voted Number 1 in Free Market trading for god knows how many consecutive years.

>I guess HK has no social housing?

HK has social housing. But they have been building very little of it. The government skewed numbers for time from application to moving in are 7+ years. In reality it is even longer than that. The Social Housing unwritten rules are prioritised to anyone coming from mainland china first, then families in HK, and finally singles. So if you are some elderly singles, you are very likely to be dead before moving into a social housing.

Now of course any singles getting any job with minimum wages you would have been over qualified for Social Housing. But a lot of times they are not full time job, and even if you do, you can barely afford to paid the rent of apartments. And even if you can, your landlord are highly unlikely to rent to these people without stable income.

So you can live on the street right, like Homeless people? Well actually living on Street or what's called public space is against the law in HK.

Free markets are not devoid of ethics. They function in large part on trust, accountability, competence, loyalty, liberty, determination, etc... Of course there are perverse elements, but so too is the case with the state.

Well lets put it this way: thanks to the government I have a bathroom and kitchen. Slumlords don't need to get re-elected.

You cannot thank the government without thanking the people that pay the government.

There's a lot of public housing but it's not very well managed and a lot of people cheat the system. Once you have a public flat you can pretty much keep it forever and pass it around within the family which means that it's not uncommon to walk past a public housing estate with Ferraris, Bugatti Veyrons and other exotic sports cars in the car park.

It has an very large social housing sector (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Hong_Kong). Almost half of all the houses / households are subsidized. Housing is the least "free market" part of the Hong Kong economy.

This is sad. They should come to Africa there is a lot of space here.

I can see this being a problem in most cities. I almost moved to Copenhagen on $108,000/yr (US) job offer and feel like it would have been a massive mistake just looking at cost of living alone. The taxes and rent prices in these cities is outrageous.

These cities? Copenhagen is nothing like Hong Kong. The only similarity is... it's not the US. I guess that's how you view the world.

Both cities are very expensive and have housing issues. I’m not saying they are the same or even all that similar in most ways, but all major world cities have big housing problems just some more than others. Good job being an asshole, though.

SF is very expensive and has housing issues. NYC. London. Toronto. And so on.

Of course, if American McDonald’s allowed such a thing, they’d have to start charging because there’d no longer be room for dining.

This how I feel about Uber Eats drivers in my local McDonalds. There’s usually 6-8 at a time, so at busy times there are often not any tables spare.

They're paying customers, seems like they have as much a right to sit down as anyone else. For that matter, they occupy that seat for a shorter period of time than someone eating would, too.

Most of the 'full' places in America, especially more casual places where there isn't waitstaff that reconfigures seating for every party seems to have a lot of underutilized tables. One person sitting at a table for four is common, and sitting next to that person is seen as awkward. That table is "Taken" - and in a lot of ways, I understand; I'm an introvert, too... and sometimes I'm not really up for conversation with my lunch. But, I find that reading the internet on your phone (and by extension, using an e-reader) are a lot more acceptable than those sorts of things used to be. With those affordances, I think it's easier than it used to be to politely say "I'm not really up for conversation today"

When such place is packed, I have no qualm to sit next to someone alone on a table for four, asking beforehand. Or even the other way around: if I'm alone on a table for four, it wouldn't bother me too much to share it.

there should be an establishment that's open 24hrs for different purposes, Cafe, sandwich shop, bar, club, hotel.

> One McRefugee renting a subdivided flat in To Kwa Wan, Hung said, told volunteers that her landlord charged her HK$16 for a unit of electricity, compared to about HK$1.10 charged by the city’s two main power suppliers.

Sounds like they're trying to peg the HKD to the USD Silver Unit[1][2][3].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinage_Act_of_1792#Authorizat... [2]https://silverprice.org/silver-price-per-ounce.html [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Silver_Eagle

edit: I can't help but notice that 2.5g is the weight in silver of the old Liberty Disme that I pick up for about $1 (paper) when I feel like putting some silver into the local economy (used as 10c). A 'spot' of silver perhaps.

This is spectacularly off topic, but the HKD is actually pegged to the real US dollar.

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