<story><title>The Perils of Private Provision of Public Goods</title><url>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3531171</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_bxg1</author><text>Anecdotally, the Starbucks at the very center of downtown Austin usually has a couple of homeless people in it. They&amp;#x27;ll come in, use the bathroom, get some AC, maybe even take a nap in a chair. The baristas happily refill their cups with clean water.&lt;p&gt;As a customer, there&amp;#x27;s sometimes a smell, and you tend to sit where you can keep an eye out (since you never know the mental state of people in that situation), but I&amp;#x27;ve never witnessed any real problems.&lt;p&gt;Honestly, it&amp;#x27;s heartwarming. It&amp;#x27;s dystopian, of course, that the provision of basic needs like these falls to a private coffee chain, but regardless of that I admire what they&amp;#x27;re doing (even though it&amp;#x27;s probably PR-driven, if we&amp;#x27;re being honest). It&amp;#x27;s not unpleasant enough for me as a customer that I&amp;#x27;d refuse to go to that location (or even walk half a dozen blocks to the next one).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>c0nsilienc3</author><text>As you said, it&amp;#x27;s an anecdote. And it&amp;#x27;s nice that it works out in that one location.&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, I&amp;#x27;ve seen how this has affected Starbucks in the nicer parts of San Francisco and the East Bay. Some Starbucks locations smell horrible, some of the restrooms are trashed and there is toilet paper everywhere. In one Starbucks on Market Street, a homeless person decided to hole up in the restroom and take a nap on the nice, cool floor with the a&amp;#x2F;c going.&lt;p&gt;I can never support forcing a private business into offering a public utility.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Perils of Private Provision of Public Goods</title><url>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3531171</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_bxg1</author><text>Anecdotally, the Starbucks at the very center of downtown Austin usually has a couple of homeless people in it. They&amp;#x27;ll come in, use the bathroom, get some AC, maybe even take a nap in a chair. The baristas happily refill their cups with clean water.&lt;p&gt;As a customer, there&amp;#x27;s sometimes a smell, and you tend to sit where you can keep an eye out (since you never know the mental state of people in that situation), but I&amp;#x27;ve never witnessed any real problems.&lt;p&gt;Honestly, it&amp;#x27;s heartwarming. It&amp;#x27;s dystopian, of course, that the provision of basic needs like these falls to a private coffee chain, but regardless of that I admire what they&amp;#x27;re doing (even though it&amp;#x27;s probably PR-driven, if we&amp;#x27;re being honest). It&amp;#x27;s not unpleasant enough for me as a customer that I&amp;#x27;d refuse to go to that location (or even walk half a dozen blocks to the next one).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Scoundreller</author><text>And while it&amp;#x27;s hard to measure, a lot of people &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; &amp;quot;support&amp;quot; Starbucks with their wallet because of that.&lt;p&gt;Some don&amp;#x27;t, but on average, it can be a net positive.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the kind of thing you need a scientific study with randomization to tease out. You can control for all the confounders you want, but you can never control for unknown&amp;#x2F;difficult to estimate confounders, like human emotion.</text></comment>