#390 1990 · Amsterdam Schiphol Airport · Facilities management / behavioral designunconscious-target
Schiphol cut its restroom cleaning bill by giving men something to aim at
the problem
Careless aim at urinals meant costly floor spillage to clean
background
Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, like any large public building, cleans its restrooms constantly, and a meaningful share of that cost comes from urine spillage around urinals — an unglamorous but real facilities-management line item multiplied across thousands of daily travelers. Signage asking men to aim carefully is the standard fix, and it is exactly the kind of instruction people register once, if at all, and then stop noticing.
The airport's own cleaning staff, not central management, were best positioned to notice the problem's real texture, since they scrubbed the floors every day. The fix that worked wasn't a new cleaning product or a stricter schedule but a change to what a man standing at a urinal was actually looking at and reacting to without thinking about it at all.
the move
Sometime in the early 1990s — the exact date is not precisely documented in available sources — at the suggestion of the cleaning department's own manager, Jos van Bedaf, who remembered a similar target used in military latrines, Schiphol had small etched images of a housefly placed near the drain of each urinal, close enough to where men naturally aim that it triggered an unconscious effort to hit it, with no sign, instruction or reminder involved.
the payoff
According to facilities manager Aad Kieboom, who later became the story's public face, the fly etching reportedly cut spillage by around 80% and total restroom cleaning costs by about 8% — figures Kieboom himself has described as an informal, empirical estimate rather than the output of a rigorous study; other industry estimates of the spillage reduction run lower, closer to 50%.
what came after
The Schiphol fly became one of the most widely cited examples in behavioral economics of a 'nudge' — Nobel laureate Richard Thaler has called it his favorite illustration of the concept — and urinal targets, flies or otherwise, have since been installed in restrooms worldwide as a near-zero-cost way to change behavior at the point of action rather than through instruction.
references
- [1]How Amsterdam Schiphol Reduced Toilet Cleaning Costs By 8% With Fake Urinal BugsSimple Flying, 2023simpleflying.com
- [2]Aiming To Reduce Cleaning CostsWorks That Work (Blake Evans-Pritchard), 2013worksthatwork.com