Tang Wanqi has lived in Hong Kong for 22 years. After coming to work in the mainland, she spent a month remembering the matter of "bringing paper when shopping", but there is another thing she most unacceptable.

If you ask, what was the most impressive thing when I went shopping last time? The answer may be that I ate a great Japanese restaurant, watched a movie with my friend, and bought a piece of clothing I had long wanted. But Tang Wanqi's answer was: bathroom.

Tang Wanqi has lived in Hong Kong for 22 years. After coming to work in the mainland, she spent a month remembering the matter of "bringing paper when shopping", but there is another thing she most unacceptable.

"The door locks in many shopping malls are broken. When there are people inside, there is no one from the outside. There are a few times when there is no way. I can only use the toilet while grabbing the door. I am particularly afraid that someone will suddenly open the door and come in at that time. That is too embarrassing." She said.

On the issue of bathroom, northern girl Wang Ji was much calmer. "My bag is always prepared. I try to find squats when I go to the shopping mall bathroom. If I have to sit down, I will use toilet paper to pad the toilet ring."

In order to understand whether consumers attach importance to the bathroom experience in offline stores and to what extent this kind of experience will affect their shopping decisions, the Golden Signature Research Office issued a questionnaire on December 15. Of the 730 questionnaires we collected, 81.4% said that they would increase the number of consumption in a certain place due to a good bathroom experience, and 87% said that if the bathroom experience in a certain store is bad, they would reduce the frequency of consumption there. It can be seen that for consumers in shopping malls, the bathroom is a very important thing to do with the entire consumer experience.

Those who understand Japanese culture will know that the Japanese have paid close attention to public bathrooms to a point where they are almost crazy. There, smart toilets are widely used in public bathrooms, and most of them have the functions of heating the seat, flushing the warm water, and even playing music to cover up the sound of the toilet. In Japan, the bathroom is also called the "dressing room", and there are usually many facilities inside that facilitate women to put on makeup and change clothes.

In the United States, the bathroom is called restroom (lounge). In addition to the toilet, there are often spacious seating areas where users can work or relax.

However, in the country, the actual situation of bathrooms in many shopping malls is probably unable to meet consumers' expectations.

Golden Signboard Research Room visited the top ten popular shopping centers in Beijing and found that the bathrooms in 4 shopping centers had door lock problems; 8 bathrooms only provided toilets, and only 2 provided toilets and other cleaning supplies; 4 bathrooms did not have places for people to place their mobile phones; the hand wiping boxes next to the sink in 4 bathrooms were empty; 2 bathrooms had obvious smoke smell.

Should the "self-cultivation" of a shopping mall include the bathroom? Maybe I really have to think so. After all, in a shopping mall, people may go shopping all day and buy nothing, but it is difficult to not go to the bathroom at once. Even the frequency of their visit to the bathroom in a shopping mall is higher than that of any store in the shopping mall.

So, has the mall realized this problem? What will they do?

Some shopping malls have thought of making the bathroom "high-end"

"Now developers have paid more and more attention to the construction of shopping mall toilets." Luo Junwei, director of the Commercial Real Estate Department of Dard, North China, told Jinzi Signature Research Room that nowadays, consumers go to shopping malls either to buy things or date, and shopping malls are becoming more and more family-oriented and social-oriented. They will pay more attention to giving consumers a sense of experience, including the bathroom.

According to Luo Junwei's observation, in the past, the bathroom design of domestic shopping malls was mostly completed with domestic design teams. Now many developers will invite foreign teams to design bathrooms. "It is not difficult to predict that in the future, the bathrooms in shopping malls will pay more and more attention to details and humanized settings, and the bathrooms will also become a multi-functional place."

Dade & Walker once spent a lot of time studying consumers born in the 1990s, 1995s and 2000s, and found that this group who grew up with the Internet cares more about the quality and experience of consumption. The mall cares about the feelings of this group of people and will also think about how to stand out among the extremely serious homogeneity of shopping malls.

"You see, it's very cold in the north now, and many leisure activities are carried out indoors. The mall is the first choice for many people. Within three or four hours of staying in the mall, people will go to the bathroom at least once or twice. If the bathroom experience is good, he will come back next time. If the experience is not good, he may drive to another mall. There are too many malls now." Luo Junwei said

. Some shopping malls use their brains to increase the experience of the bathroom:

Tianjin Joy City

Tianjin Joy City once launched the "Your care, its smile" finless porpoise theme bathroom. It uses holographic projection technology in the corridor at the entrance of the bathroom, making the porpoise seem to be swimming in front of customers; the bathroom is decorated with naked-eye 3D floor stickers and full wall hand-painting, presenting the scene of the "undersea world".

△ Tianjin Joy City's "Your care, its smile" finless porpoise theme bathroom.

Taiwan Zhongyou Department Store

is located in Taichung City Taiwan. It is mainly aimed at consumers, students and young office workers. There are nearly 20 bathrooms with different themes in the mall, and some tourists will even come to take photos and check in. The bathrooms here have also been featured in Time magazine, and four of them have been selected as one of the "Top Ten Wonderful Bathrooms in the World".

△ Chocolate sweetheart theme bathroom at 3F, Building A, China Youth Department Store, Taiwan.

Guangzhou Taikoo Hui

Guangzhou Taikoo Hui's bathroom has won many internationally renowned design awards such as the Global Design Award of the Hong Kong Designers Association and the Red Dot Design Award of the German Design Association. This bathroom is designed with the "bright grottoes". At first glance, it looks a bit like a milky cave. The walls and ceilings are also equipped with green plants. It is worth noting that this bathroom is mainly environmentally friendly and is equipped with two toilets: vacuum water saving and cyclone flushing. Compared with traditional toilets, it saves about 85% and 50% of water each time. The washing and hand drying functions of the washbasin can save about 550,000 pieces of hand wipe paper each year.

△ Guangzhou Taikoo Hui mainly promotes the concept of environmental protection.

Taikoo Hui wrote in a written reply to the Jinzi Signboard Research Room: "The bathroom may not be the main factor for customers to choose a shopping mall, but if the bathroom service is comfortable and caring, it will definitely leave a good impression and reputation on the public. It is an important factor in encouraging customers to visit again and again and drive the growth of customer flow."

High-value bathrooms can indeed "gain fans". In our questionnaire, "Hardware facilities such as toilet paper, hand sanitizer, mobile phone drying use high-quality or more beautiful brands" were selected by consumers as the second plus for toilet experience, and "unique interior design" ranked third. To a certain extent, the bathrooms in the three shopping malls listed above have put a lot of effort into this regard.

Daily operation and maintenance may be more important

However, no matter how high-end and elegant the bathroom is, people's most essential requirements for it have not changed.

In the questionnaire statistics of the Jinzi Signboard Research Room, when asked "what kind of bathroom experience is good", consumers value the most is that "the hardware facilities such as toilet paper, flush buttons, faucets, door locks, hooks, etc. are sufficient and can be used normally." As for "what kind of bathroom is the most unbearable for you", "not clean" and "too frightening" are undoubtedly at the forefront.

In order to solve the problem of "too flirtatious", Beijing Yitigang Shopping Center has installed two bottles of fragrance in each of its bathrooms. They are specially placed about 20 cm from the ceiling vent. It is understood that this method of placing fragrance equipment can ensure that the materials will not be blown away quickly because the equipment is too close to the air vent, and there is no need to worry that the equipment is too far away from the air vent and cannot have an ideal deodorization effect. The radiation area of ​​each fragrance is about 25 to 30 square meters, and two are placed in each bathroom, which just provides basic odor removal ability.

Yiti Port has been officially opened in 2012, and it has been more than five years since then. This makes it limited by conditions and cannot provide too many novel and cool bathroom hardware facilities.

But we still found a lot of humanized designs there: each independent toilet has a mirror with a whole wall, which seems to be tailor-made for consumers who pay attention to their image; behind its toilet, there is a countertop that is more than ten centimeters wide, which is convenient for customers with too many personal belongings to place things; and each toilet has two small rolls of toilet paper side by side. It is said that the small rolls of toilet paper with better texture can make customers feel more comfortable, and the practice of equipting two rolls of paper avoids the embarrassment of some customers suddenly finding that there is no paper in the paper trough after going to the toilet.

Golden Signboard Research Room learned that Yitigang believes that customers’ favorable feelings for the store are related to the brand they enter, but the place where they feel the most about the mall itself is the bathroom. Compared to investing a lot of costs in hardware, its property team will put more effort into daily operations in order to provide a good experience.

According to the regulations of Yiti Port, the bathroom cleaner must achieve "one use and one cleaning", that is, after each toilet is used once, it must be cleaned immediately. Its bathroom wall will be covered with information about the day's cleaners and service supervisors. The supervisor will inspect the cleaning of the bathroom every day and use it as an important assessment indicator for relevant employees. When the cleaner handed over shift, the next cleaner needs to confirm the sanitary condition of each toilet, the remaining toilet paper usage, and the damage to the facilities.

Even if it is a tool to clean the bathroom, Yiti Port has made clear divisions and regulations. Its bathroom management manual says: Red gloves and red rags are used to clean toilets, and yellow gloves and white rags are used to clean countertops and hardware... The cleaning staff here are asked to "clean the bathroom as their own bathroom." The team will also have training once a week to make targeted improvements to the problems complained by customers or situations discovered by supervisors.

"For example, recently a guest reported that there was an odor in the bathroom. We held a meeting (summary) and said that it was caused by the floor drain. Later (to work) first filled the floor drain with water. This kind of problem can be solved as long as the work is done properly." During the visit, an employee who did not want to be named said.

In this way, if retail is Detail is a truth, then this detail must also include the shopping mall bathroom. Although the hardware conditions vary between shopping malls, improving management level is always an important way to maintain a good experience in the bathroom. If you want to check the management level of a shopping mall and how well you control the details, you might as well go and check out its bathroom next time.

We also learned about some of the century-old unsolved cases about bathrooms

① Why some public bathrooms only provide toilets

A organization has conducted a survey. More than 70% of people use public bathrooms will give priority to squat toilets, and many people have been taught by their parents since childhood: toilets outside cannot be seated. Although toilets have long been widely used in Western countries, in China, people generally lack trust in toilets in public bathrooms. Some respondents even left messages on our questionnaire, and the most dissatisfied was that there was no squatted toilet in the mall.

So, why are there so many shopping malls only setting up toilets?

Some shopping malls consider that when the countertop of the squat stool pool becomes contaminated, the cleaner first needs to clean the dirt into the pit and then rinse the countertop with a lot of water. After cleaning, it is difficult to dry the floor in the toilet in a short time, which is very inconvenient for the next customer to use. The pollution of the toilet is almost all inside the toilet. If the cleaner strictly follows the company's operating rules, the pollution and bacteria will not affect other parts of the toilet.

. Many shopping malls have already solved the problem of customers’ concerns about public toilets by configuring disinfectant, disposable paper pads and other items. However, to completely eliminate users' hygiene concerns, consumers maintain good toilet habits themselves, which seems to be as important as the property team doing a good job in daily cleaning and maintenance.

②Why do paper in the bathroom appear and disappear from time to time

In the shopping center we visited, many toilet paper, hand paper and cushion paper boxes in the bathroom are empty.There is no doubt that for semi-open bathrooms like shopping malls, the consumption of paper is huge. The cleaning staff at a shopping center in Beijing did some calculations and each floor of the mall consumed about 15 rolls of large rolls of toilet paper per day (the amount of this large roll of paper is much larger than that of our household rolls). The mall where she works has 5 floors, which means that the mall consumes 75 rolls of paper every day. Calculated as 7 yuan per roll of large rolls of paper, the mall needs to spend about 190,000 yuan a year to purchase toilet paper.

In recent years, a number of smart machines providing toilet paper have also appeared on the market, trying to reduce the waste of toilet paper. For example, the biometric paper feeder "face-scanning toilet paper" has functions such as quantitative paper output and restricting repeated paper extraction in a short period of time. Some businesses also use vending machines directly to ask customers to spend money on paper, etc.

However, electronic devices have barriers to use. If the operation is too complicated, especially when facing customers who are not familiar with new technologies, controlling the cost of paper may be a bad experience.

③ Why is smoking banned in shopping malls and bathrooms so difficult

Although many cities have banned smoking in public places, shopping malls and bathrooms are still like a "fish that misses the net". Some people will come back from the bathroom and smell of smoke, or find several burnt black marks on the white toilet lid.

The smoking ban administrator at a shopping center in Beijing discovered that the awareness of smoking ban by shopping malls has increased, and those who like to smoke in the bathroom are instead of the clerks who settle in the store. Since most clerks need to see the store and cannot leave the counter for a long time to go outdoors to smoke, the bathroom has become a place where they "deal with the wind".

Once you find smoking in the bathroom, the administrator can only persuade you and cannot do more. "The main reason is that the shopping mall does not pay attention to it. What can I do?" he said.

Shopping malls have already thought of more prevention and control measures for the ban on smoking in the bathroom. For example, Yiti Port has installed an independent smoke sensing alarm in each toilet. Once the alarm is triggered and the persuasion to smokers is invalid, the service supervisor on the day will come forward to negotiate.

If the tenant employee smokes, Yiti Port will also communicate with the tenant in a timely manner and ask the latter to make a written commitment. During the actual implementation process, whether the tenant follows the safety rules of the mall, including smoking ban, has also been included in the mall's assessment indicators for tenants.

Indeed, not all shopping malls have the conditions to upgrade the bathroom hardware. But at least, every mall can add some impression points to yourself in daily maintenance. The toilet is a big deal. We also show the toilet experiences of some respondents for reference in some shopping malls or offline stores to see what aspects can be improved in the overall consumption experience.

(Note: The above and below respondents may have been suspected of praising a shopping mall, but we really didn't advertise.)

@Chuchudongxiong

"I went to a lot of Henglong Plaza in the mainland. I feel that the best experience is the bathroom in Henglong Plaza in the center of Wuxi, which is really great. To be precise, it should be a bathroom + powder room + lounge. And the bathroom in a star-rated hotel is very good."

@Ich

"The public toilet really makes people feel very unclean. The bathroom must be clean, just like the kitchen, it will make people feel very favorable. If there is a special point, it is very good. It looks good, and you can't help but take a photo (photograph the toilet). "

@来~来…

" I think the most basic thing is that everyone should respect the bathroom, don't think you will never go there again after you go? For example, use your feet to flush the toilet. Is that obviously a hand-flushing button? ! "

@Xiaowei is running

" I heard that all the speakers in Japanese women's toilets will make a loud sound of water flowing, covering up the sound of urine. I think this is quite decent, I don't know if you agree. The best toilet I have ever been to is from W Hotel Shanghai. The toilet is like a nightclub, and the decoration is too gorgeous to find where to wash your hands."

@Ms. Jie Simin💃

" Since you have a toilet, you should prepare a disposable toilet cushion. Isn't this the same standard as toilet paper? "

@Little Owl

" Don't be a toilet, it will be uncomfortable. IKEA's is better and provides disinfection paper, but I still don't like toilets. "

The following is anonymous message:

" I just returned from a Japanese trip. Not to mention that even the toilets in Shirakawa Township are electronic. If you sit down in the ice and snow, you can really understand what warmth is! "

" There are toilets in some shopping malls in Guangzhou that have sink mirrors and makeup mirrors. A mirror corresponds to a sink, and there are LED lights around the mirror. I feel good after going to the toilet~"

" The bathroom in Shanghai Raffles Mall is very clean, with no odor, and has disposable paper pads. The interior design is also great, girls have separate dressing room. "

" It is a conscience to have hot water in the shopping center in winter. The bathroom is spacious and has enough places to hang things. It is automatic flushing, and the bathroom has tissues, so the space is large enough. "

" The best shopping center bathroom that has been to is Guangzhou Taikoo Hui. It is more than one level higher than other shopping centers in Guangzhou in terms of comfort and cleanliness. Moreover, the design of each bathroom in the mall is different. There is a one-floor bathroom with a Red Dot Design Award. The "

" washbasin has aromatherapy, the tissue location and faucet are designed reasonably and clean, and the toilet compartment has a clean and bright storage rack. "

" Nanjing Deji Plaza, the platform for placing items is very large, but there is no disposable toilet pad. Suzhou Aeon Mengle City and Jiuguang, there are dressing tables and a large number. Most shopping malls such as Taikoo Li in Chengdu have disposable toilet pads, and the impression is very good! ”

Intern reporter: Deng Shuxia

Visual design: Che Lingling

Editor: Huang Hanyu