Starbucks opened its bathrooms to winos, and you won't believe what happened next

Mr. Barista, unlock this door!

Paying customers stopped coming.

pOWERLINE: Actually, you don’t need to guess, but in case you’re curious, we have some social science on the question, in the form of a paper from two researchers at Boston College and one at the University of Texas, recently posted to the Social Science Research Network. The paper is entitled “The Perils of Private Provision of Public Goods.” Here’s the abstract, which is pretty startling even without decoding it from academeze (my highlights):

In May 2018, in response to protests, Starbucks changed its policies nationwide to allow anybody to sit in their stores and use the bathroom without making a purchase. Using a large panel of anonymized cellphone location data, we estimate that the policy led to a 7.3% decline in store attendance at Starbucks locations relative to other nearby coffee shops and restaurants. This decline cannot be calculated from Starbucks’ public disclosures, which lack the comparison group of other coffee shops. The decline in visits is around 84% larger for stores located near homeless shelters. The policy also affected the intensive margin of demand: remaining customers spent 4.1% less time in Starbucks relative to nearby coffee shops after the policy enactment. Wealthier customers reduced their visits more, but black and white customers were equally deterred. The policy led to fewer citations for public urination near Starbucks locations, but had no effect on other similar public order crimes. These results show the difficulties of companies attempting to provide public goods, as potential customers are crowded out by non-paying members of the public.

The body of the complete article is even more explicit about the cost of Starbuck’s virtue-signaling, including “the new policy appears to have significantly reduced visits to Starbucks 

Aww, the poor guys. Next, they’ll discover that their reusable-cup program is scaring away panicked WuHUFlu customers. Oh, wait …