Yesterday, I went with my wife and three children to the
centre of my city Almere, by bike. The weather was fantastic and so were the
moods. We all love to bicycle and when
the winds are low and the temperature is high, nothing can beat riding one’s
bike.
Even though all our children had visited a toilet before
leaving home, two had to go to the toilet again, once we had reached the city
centre.
While you might expect a story about dirty and smelly public
lavatories, that one only uses when really, really necessary, it will be the
total opposite. We visited a small shop and for the price of €0,70 per capita,
my two children could visit a clean and pleasantly smelling lavatory in the
centre of the city, sponsored by Witte Reus (i.e. an inexpensive A-label detergent,
fabricated by German cleaning behemoth Henkel).
And when you look carefully, you might notice that many more
of such specialized lavatory shops have appeared in the centres of cities and
small towns in The Netherlands and beyond, of which “2-the-loo”
is probably the most famous one. This shopping chain aimes at turning a public toilet-visit
into a ‘bathroom extravaganza experience’, including multiple kinds of bathroom
soap, soft fabric towels and bathroom perfume and deodorizer (all for sale in
these shops).
While such lavatory shops might seem a blessing in disguise
for people in desperate need (hence: a clean and pleasant, public toilet in the
city centre), the idea gives me nevertheless an itchy feeling.
Now I had to pay €1,40 for two children and that in a time,
in which cash money is becoming more and more a thing of the past. If I
wouldn’t have had this money at hand, my children could perhaps not have gone
to the toilet at all.
And why did this large brand of washing detergent ‘Witte
Reus’ sponsor this public lavatory?! Did Henkel not sell enough washing power
anymore? Or was this the brilliant idea of the new marketing director, who
thought that “differentiation was the key
for success in the dog-eat-dog, Dutch cleaning landscape”?! Who will know?!
And the most itchy question: should offering and maintaining
a quite clean, public toilet for ladies and gentlemen in the city centres not
be a public task (i.e. a task for the local municipality)? And should public
toilets not be accessible for free, as urinating against buildings, city trees
and in small tunnels is forbidden and can be penalized with roughly €40, not
even to mention the fact that it is virtually impossible for women?!
In retrospect, citizens of Dutch cities pay a substantial
amount of money in taxes to their municipalities and provinces. In exchange, offering
a good and complete community infrastructure is one of the major tasks, that
should be achieved with this tax money. Free accessible, safe and quite clean,
public toilets ought to be part of this city infrastructure and should – in my
humble opinion – not be left to commercial companies and shop-owners, who need
to make a living from this activity.
And one more thing: under the relentless pressure of their
spoilt, profit-hungry shareholders, the large corporations and large store
chains try to get an ever-larger influence on our daily lives, at the expense
of small, independent shops and restaurants and also of free public services.
Not only the ‘Witte Reus’-sponsored lavatory is an example
of this increasing influence.
Think about all sponsored TV-programs or all TV-channels,
owned by large corporations... And think about the genuine carpet bombing of
commercials that especially our children
have to endure: not only around the children’s holidays, like ‘Sinterklaas”
(i.e. Dutch Santa Clause), Easter and Christmas, but every day. This carpet
bombing happens on the Dutch national children’s TV-channel and even more on
the commercial channels, like Disney, Jetix and Nickelodeon.
Children are small, but influential consumers – through their
parents’ wallets – that allegedly need to be mesmerized by the tinsel of the
big corporations.
This commercial carpet bombardment makes my children think –
especially my oldest son is very vulnerable for the message of the big
corporations – that Lipton Icetea is much better than homemade icetea. And that
Fanta is much tastier than house brand orange soda, which sells at less than
half the price. Or that life without Lego, Play-Doh, Star Wars action puppets
and the latest digital gadgets from China, is useless.
Where in the past the simple title ‘sausage roll’ sufficed
for a breadroll with smoked sausage, sold at cafeteria’s and in amusement
parks, this is nowadays called a “Unox” Breadroll, after the biggest Dutch brand
of canned and processed meat owned by Unilever. And its sauce – probably a simple
mixture of mayonnaise and tomato ketchup – is now sold separately as Unox
Breadroll sauce.
This is the result of the fact that Unilever took over /
endorsed large parts of the snack sales in large amusement parks and on public
fairs. Independent snack sellers, with often excellent, artisanal quality chips
(i.e. French fries), hamburgers and smoked sausages, are in fact expelled by
the financial power and supply chain of the large corporations.
Philips (household appliances) worked together with Douwe
Egberts (coffee), Nestlé works together with Krups (Nespresso coffee) and
McDonalds works together with Mars and Unilever, on behalf of its icecream
products, as one big, corporate, happy family.
Teenagers in this century might wonder how their parents
ever drank coffee without having a Starbucks shop around and ate chips, sausage
and hamburgers without McDonalds and Burger King in the neighbourhood. And
last, but not least: what did their parents do without “free” online games and endless
amounts of videos on the broadband internet? “Were you not bored to death, without all these possibilities?!”
A few weeks ago, I was having a reunion with a few friends
and neighbours from the old neighbourhood where I grew up in my youth (see picture). While
musing about the past and our childhood, we noted that we hardly spent time IN
house in those years in the Seventies and early Eighties. There were no home
computers yet, there was no daytime children’s television and no internet.
 |
| Reunion of old friends, living in Castricum Picture courtesy of: De Zeehelden Click to enlarged |
So when you read all your books and didn’t want to go to the
library again, you had to spend your time playing outside: playing football, street
tennis, ‘kerbstoning’ (i.e. a Dutch game of throwing a football against the
kerbstones of the street), shooting marbles, blowing paper arrows with pvc
tubes and doing all kinds of gymnastic tricks with some spare clothes’ elastic
of your mum. Or perhaps with doing some monkey business and (very) small
mischief.
With the risk of being slightly nostalgic, life in those
days was not bad at all and it was especially not so in the grasp of the large
multinationals and corporations, like nowadays.
There were already large brands like Philips, Mars, Coca Cola,
Unilever, Sony, Adidas and Puma, but these brands did just what they had to do
and were not so forcefully incorporated in the hearts and minds of the people
yet.
In those days Unox still made canned soup, canned meat and
smoked sausages alone, Witte Reus produced relatively cheap detergent (and
nothing more), Philips and Sony made televisions and radios, while Adidas and
Puma made sports clothes and shoewear for about every sport there was, without
making a fuzz about it.
Sports stars were not yet the living mannequins-with-technical-hairdo’s,
that they are now today, advertising football shoes and sports clothes in every
colour of the rainbow. And most American food, beverage and coffee chains were
still a thing of the future in The Netherlands and beyond, without ever giving
us the idea that we really missed something.
In those days, private shareholders were either old ladies
with a nest egg or rentiers and retirees, who were happy and pleased with every
dividend payment, without spurring the management for 20+% annual growth rates.
And urinating in public places? As a women, one could either
go to a public loo, where it smelled like hell, or to a small café or pub, with
the obligation to order something. And a man could always find a thick tree to
candidly do his thing, as the police did not care so much about peeing in
public in those days. It was not as nice and clean as today, but it was mostly
free.
Perhaps the current days offer more possibilities, but those
days seemed to offer more really free choice, as a matter of fact, as the commercialization,
“corporization” and “chainization” of The Netherlands did not go so far yet.
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