Somewhere between “no non-customers in the bathroom, no exception” and operating a mini-homeless shelter in the middle of your restaurant is a happy medium. We don’t think that compromise is the approach that a Tennessee restaurant took, which was to track down a non-customer using her license plate information and send her a bill for the restroom fee. $5.

What the non-customer had missed was a sign on the restroom mirror that described the $5 fee. “It was a little index card at the very bottom of the mirror,” she told NBC’s Today Show. Using the mirror was not the first thing on the woman’s mind at the time, and she learned about the fee when an employee brought it to her attention as she was leaving.

She did not pay. So the restaurant wrote down her license plate number, contacted the town sheriff, and obtained the name and address that her car was registered to. She later received a handwritten letter explaining the fee and asking her to send it already.

That is a very effective use of law enforcement resources.

Restaurant to non-patron: You must pay to pee [NBC] (via On The Edge)

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