there is so much going on here.
We want to be tolerant.
But Capitalism.
But restroom materials and service cost money.
The issue is not money to run the restrooms. The marginal cost of extra people using the restrooms is trivial. You already have spent the capital to build it, so anything more is… some more rolls of toilet paper, and a few more hours of minimum wage janitorial staff?
The issue is who would use publicly available, free restrooms. Which is to say randos: homeless people, criminals, passerby’s and tourists who do not have money to spare, etc. Free facilities often attract that kind of people, and store managers are deathly afraid of their consumerist utopia looking like a waystation for riffraff (like our stereotypes of bus stations or public libraries.)
Which is why the exclusion of capitalism is so vital. It’s for everyone who is clean and responsible and will draw more people to want to be a customer at that store. In the new era that includes transgender people and handicap people and racial minorities, which is great progress, but it still relies on the idea that some groups of people are unwanted, and too many of them are a nuisance not a blessing.
Problem: While some people are unwanted for reasons that are griping, others are unwanted for reasons that are valid.
Quite frankly I think restricting it to customers in environments where there are a lot of people that would muck it up is a valid decision, and while I suggested materials and money, I should have included opportunity-cost type stuff as well.
I get that it’s ‘ironic’, but it doesn’t feel particularly deep to me, and the secondary side-effects - either those that brought this situation about, or of whatever solution will be undertaken to ‘fix’ this - are being ignored. (Though less so by you. More in the general case.)
You might just think of it as my having developed an emotional eye-rolling reaction to this type of critique.