It could be the economy or the fact that spending time in McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD), Target (NYSE:TGT), Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX), and Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) is more pleasant than it used to be. All of these retailers certainly have clean and well-heated stores.

There appears to be a rise in the number of homeless people and people who are mentally ill in the aisles and at the tables of America’s largest retailers, fast food coffee chains and restaurants. These establishments are often crowded enough or are in buildings that cover enough square feet so that a person could be lost, or to some extent hide in plain sight.

It is impossible to find how many people are homeless. Indigents move around and spend a great deal of their time trying not to be counted, noticed, arrested, or taken to shelters. The Urban Institute says 3.5 million Americans don’t have homes. That number would put the total at 1% of the US population. Some of these people are homeless for financial reasons. Some are mentally ill. Some left their homes because of domestic abuse. The list of reasons that people live on the streets or in shelters is long.

The National Institutes of Health reports that nearly 1% of people over 18 year of age are schizophrenic. That means about two million Americans suffer from this disorder. It is estimated that 6% of these people are homeless or live in shelters.

The average Wal-Mart is 100,000 square feet and some superstores are more than double that size. A McDonald’s is not nearly that large, but some patrons come to have coffee or a meal and stay for hours. Other “patrons” may be at the restaurant without having ordered anything at all. Some large discount retail outlets probably patrol their stores carefully for vagrants. Others either don’t have the personnel or don’t care. Either way, there are homeless and mentally ill people who come to stores and fast food outlets and linger for hours and sometimes the better part of a day.

Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, and other companies that have businesses based on the patronage of tens of millions of customers visiting their locations each year must have policies for screening people who come through their doors, but these policies are likely to be enforced unevenly. It is impossible to tell immediately if some potential shoppers are homeless or mentally ill. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Wal-Mart has no moral obligation to allow people who are cold to come into their stores for a few hours especially if they are unlikely to be customers. But, allowing those people to stay in the stores demonstrates a moral decision, or at least a level of casual compassion not usually associated with huge multinational corporations

It may be cynical but true that many large companies with locations which are frequented by the homeless or mentally ill have decided to avoid the issue of who can enter their stores because of the Americans with Disabilities Act. No company wants to be challenged in public by the American Civil Liberties Union for failing to offer reasonable treatment for all customers, even if those customers may not be customers at all. It is possible that retailers and fast food restaurants have decided to avoid screening people who enter their establishments.

All ethics are local, at least as far as companies with thousands of retail locations are concerned. A store manager at Starbucks may live within a few miles of the store he or she manages, and may know the neighborhood and patrons well. The person who runs a Target store may keep a very careful and discrete eye on who comes to shop. The decision about who is allowed to stay in a store or coffee shop is almost certainly ad hoc in the great majority of the cases. There is no way to know how many homeless people are allowed to stay for a long period in one shop or another. The staff may not want to create a scene or a may choose to let someone be warm when it is freezing outside.

Large chains cannot reasonably ask their employees to be social workers or psychiatrists. The difference between someone who is mentally ill and an eccentric customer may be too subtle for most people to discern. A store manager faced with the decision to ask someone to leave may actually have no idea whether that person has an illness or not.  These managers are certainly not trained to recognize if someone is likely to become violent, and, a small number of the mentally ill are dangerous to themselves and others. That is at the root of the temptation, usually, for retail employees to worry about letting the homeless stay in their stores; that and the appearance of someone who is shabby among customers who are appropriately dressed which is, in other words, a concern about perception and branding. But, the question of whether a homeless or mentally ill person could be dangerous has to be a concern for every store manager and employee.

The largest retailers and restaurant chains almost certainly have policies about who can come into their stores and who can stay. They may never be widely circulated because of concerns about the appearance of discrimination. These guidelines may simply be quietly disseminated.

“Any unruly customer should be asked to leave and if they will not, it is your responsibility to call local law enforcement”. And, by the way “Use your own judgment.”  But, someone very senior in management has made a decision about who should stay and who should go at the retail outlets of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. Nearly no one knows who makes the decision, but the policy says as much as any other the company has about how it operates at the intersection of ethics, customer care, concern about legal liabilities, and compassion for people in the broader society.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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