Toilet Seat Covers - Small Price for Customer Comfort

I have always held the philosophy that sanitation is the most important aspect of that makes a bathroom useable. Most people who walk in typically make an immediate judgment call based on how dirty it looks. We all want to protect ourselves from potential contamination or general injury.

Disposable toilet seat covers have long been thought to protect users from coming into contact with bacteria and germs that could cause illness. Medical shows and movies have often used the plot of women claiming that they became pregnant or contracting an STD through toilet seat contact. Even I have pointed in out in my reviews if any restrooms did not have seat covers available. But research represents actual data, and research shows that there’s no protective use for toilet seat covers.

With 695 patents for toilet seat covers, it’s obvious that the exact origin of toilet seat covers can be highly debated. The general idea behind it was rather simple though. Create a barrier between your skin and a germy surface sounds like the best idea in theory. But research by Dr. William Schaffner has shown that the main benefit from utilizing toilet seat covers is merely peace of mind. After all, our cell phones typically carry more germs than actual toilet seats, and we don’t put disposable paper on them in order to protect ourselves from anything – and that goes up to our faces.

Interestingly, Maine initially had legislation drafted in order to make it a law for all public restrooms to have toilet seat covers available. In 2009 it was sent over to the Health and Human Services Committee, but it never actually got enough steam to make the legislation into an actual law. Roughly five years later, Dr. Schaffner published his work analyzing the moot purpose of the seat covers.

So, research has determined that toilet seat covers mainly just serve a peace of mind for its users.

How much are companies spending while they cater to this mental resolution?

The average cost of seat cover dispensers ranges between $20 and $40. Most individual packs come with 250 covers in them, at a price around $20. The average public bathroom (non-single occupancy) has 3 stalls. So for general set-up, that’s around $150; plus factoring in all of the replacement covers.

You could get up to 250 uses out of each pack, but I know I have seen stages of disarray in the seat dispensers – so sometimes people are grabbing more than one. Additionally, I have personally experienced the wrath of motion-sensor toilet flushing. Normally I think they awesome; I don’t have to touch a handle! But then it’s a time-sensitive game of getting the seat on the toilet and trying not to move too quickly while still making sure the toilet doesn’t start to flush, sending the cover to its watery grave before it has fully served its purpose.

Let’s be optimistic. Let’s say all three have to be replaced every two weeks.

You have initial set-up of $150. Plus twenty-five times of re-ordering (52 weeks, minus the 2 weeks of ‘set-up’; 25 total orders) – looking at $1500 a year in restock, totaling to $1650 optimistically.

On one hand, $1650 per year for a bathroom is pretty cheap. But that’s just one bathroom. Keeping in mind both genders, you’re looking at $3300.

Grand scheme of things – a particular facility may only be paying $3300 per year on toilet seat covers. However, there are several other areas where that money could be spent – either in a way to improve toilet paper quality, add better scent/smell control, or in labor to have the bathrooms cleaned more frequently.

On the other end, it is just $3300 a year. If a venue wants to focus on their customers and their overall experience, that mental comfort might be a reasonable price to pay to keep the customer happy with their placebo product. This being the case, the mere presence of toilet seat covers may be a reflection on the company itself. It most likely lends to a more traditional establishment, or a business that really cares about its customers.

So maybe toilet seat covers are bogus. But I’ll still call out if a place has them available. It does say a lot about the businesses that offer them.