W EEKLY EDITI ON MAY 31, 2017
Member News: The Poop Scoop on Festival Season features PSAI
Member Service Sanitation …continued
By Leor Galil as provided to the Chicago Reader, May 24, 2017
The day of the Cubs' World Series championship parade, Kay wound up on a 1 AM conference call with representatives from the c ity
and the Cubs (among others). They wanted hundreds of porta - potties for Grant Park and the parade route, so Kay got 25 drivers to
pull ten - hour shifts on short notice. Fortunately, he had a few weeks' notice to prepare the porta - potties at McCormick Place for
Obama's farewell speech.
Like the porta - potty industry, the modern music - festival industry is slowly but surely adapting to the needs of the people who are
willing to spend all day watching music outdoors. Sometimes that means leaning into porta - potties' bad reputation to sell something
else. This year the Pitchfork Music Festi val introduced the +Plus three - day pass, which costs more than twice as much as a general -
admission pass and promises access to special amenities — including air - conditioned bathrooms.
Service Sanitation and its peers aren't the only ones who've figured out that many people dread being at a music festival and realizing
they need a bathroom. Companies that aren't already in the business have devised branding opportunities by attempting to
transform a necessary evil into an attraction in its own right. At the Life Is Beautiful fest last year in Las Vegas, Zappos debuted its
" Porta Party ," a bathroom trailer tricked out with doodads and gimmicks that include a 40 - inch TV, a selfie station, a photosensitive
trigger that changes the lights in the room when you pee , and a machine that dispenses trinkets when you flush.
Service Sanitation doesn't offer those kinds of perks — at least not yet — but it dominates the local market without them. When your
business provides a necessity that most people wouldn't want to deal w ith themselves even if they could, all you've usually got to do
to keep a customer is avoid screwing up. In 2016, Kay says, Service Sanitation pumped 9,816,000 gallons of waste — enough to fill
almost 15 Olympic - size pools — and used 1,598,176 rolls of toilet paper. "As soon as you have the event locked, you get the porta -
potties and you get the stage — they're kind of one and the same," Heyl says. "You can't have a band without a stage, and you can't
have people without porta - potties."
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