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Comment by rawgabbit | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago I visited three different McDonalds in Washington DC. All three were newly renovated in downtown.

All three restrooms were unlocked and disgusting. After notifying the staff I figured out some homeless would vent their rage by literally smearing their feces on the walls. When the staff clean it up, they would do it again.

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That’s seriously disgusting. But even without mental illness, you still have people that seem like they don’t know bathroom etiquette. I worked at a retailer during college that had a public bathroom, seemingly normal people still did the most disgusting messes in the toilets that I was left to clean.

When I was a teenager, I worked as a janitor at McDonalds as my after-school job, and I cleaned the bathrooms. I walked the lobby all the time and could see who was going in and out, and I can assure you (at least back then) there is no correlation between socio-economic class and bathroom etiquette, or mental illness and bathroom etiquette. We had a feces-smearer who was a middle aged lady visiting the restaurant with her normal-looking middle class family. One other fun fact: The men's room was pretty uniformly (but medium) disgusting, but the women's room was where the variance was. I saw foulness in the women's restroom that haunts me to this day.

Agreed regarding the variance of the women’s bathroom, I shocked it up to a larger number of women vs men customers in that particular retailer.

The McDonalds in downtown Dallas, at least for a time, played classical music outside as well as inside. The theory was that the homeless wouldn't hang around as much. This was back in the 80s when my mom worked downtown, and it was common water cooler conversation. I'm sure as a manager, you're pretty much willing to try anything to avoid the situation you've described. Making it even harder, the location is one block away from the central Greyhound bus station.

My favorite is when places use opera music to drive away loiterers.

They have the right to refuse entry to homeless people. They should exercise it.

How are you going to say it's because they are homeless and not whatever minority.

Wouldn't the burden of proof lie with whomever is making the claim of bias? And it would be easily countered with surveillance footage showing just one white male homeless guy getting turned away.

Let's make life more difficult for the people already with the hardest life. Nice mentality.

Invite them into your home then. Let them smear shit all over your walls.

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