Through a combination of bad planning and an ageing bladder, I recently found myself needing to use the loo at what I would generously describe as ‘the Shopping Centre that Time Forgot’. After completing the necessary business, I was preparing to make a swift exit when I noticed a poster on the inside of the door – “How did you find our toilets today?” – along with a QR code for providing feedback.

Several thoughts occurred, the first being the ambiguous wording. Were they asking about my overall impression of the toilets? Or were they asking how I managed to locate them? By happy coincidence, the same answer applied either way: they smelled overwhelmingly of stale urine.

The second thought related to the pointlessness – in statistical terms, at least – of the exercise. As many a dodgy opinion poll has shown, a crucial limitation of survey data is that participants tend to be self-selecting. Not many people will reveal their voting intentions to cold callers – and of those that do, plenty won’t tell the truth. The polling companies know this, so they build adjustments into their methods to account for the anticipated discrepancy. Or, to put it more straightforwardly, they change the numbers because otherwise they’d be essentially useless.

With that in mind, how representative of broader society are those people who actively choose to complete feedback forms about toilets, in their own time and for no reward? It’s surely nobody’s idea of a microcosm – and that’s before narrowing the group down further to people without the slightest qualm about whipping out their camera phones in public bogs. “No need to take that attitude with me, pal – I’m just scanning a QR code to complain about the lack of urinal cakes in the left-hand trough.”

And one more thing: why on earth would anyone need online feedback to inform their decisions around toilet maintenance? 

Is there a lack of consensus around what qualities are desirable in a public loo? Surely the staff members – who, as the meticulously completed sheet on the wall will attest, check the toilets every hour of every day – have developed the skills to distinguish the just-about-OK from the truly stomach-churning? I can have a quick stab myself if it’s useful: positive traits include the presence of soap, running water (ideally including taps), toilet paper and lockable cubicles. Negative indicators include the absence of the above, along with a ghastly fug of defecation and decay. Happy to help – and not a QR code in sight.

All this might seem an overreaction to a sign in a toilet. But it’s part of a wider, more insidious trend towards quantification at the expense of meaning. No way is that poster part of any corporate drive towards continuous lavatorial improvement, or whatever nonsense term they prefer to use. It exists solely so that a manager somewhere can (a) look through all ten completed feedback forms (b) note that only one person explicitly stated their intention to pursue legal action for distress caused by the toilets, then (c) claim in an internal memo that market research indicates a customer satisfaction rating of 90%. Off the back of this, the manager gets a bonus, the company proudly cites the figure in its annual report, and everyone accepts it without question because well, you can’t argue with the numbers, can you? Not even when you’re wading through a river of piss that, on the face of it, would appear to contradict them.

It’s all part of the phenomenon – let’s call it Tripadvisorfication – that leads us to base our choices not on experience and instinct but on a pseudo-scientific mass of averaged-out ratings. It’s increasingly common to see in-store posters imploring you to give their staff at least 8 out of 10 in your feedback, because 7 and below is counted – in performance management terms, you’re invited to assume – as zero. The company could obtain equally meaningful data by asking people to rate them between 0 and 3. But then they couldn’t claim, out of context, that the vast majority of customers rated them 8 out of 10 or above.

Rant over – except to say that if you’ve been affected by any of the issues raised here, why not use our bespoke offline feedback system? Simply write the first three expletives that come to mind on a piece of A4 paper, then nail it to a tree. It’s just as useful as filling in an online feedback form, but so much more satisfying.