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The Economics of Everyday Things

78. Porta-Potties

The Economics of Everyday Things

Freakonomics Network

Business

4.81.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

They're not always the nicest places to go — but for their owners, portable toilets are a lucrative revenue stream. Zachary Crockett lifts the lid.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

There's a moment when you're three beers and two hours deep into an outdoor concert,

0:07.9

and suddenly you realize you need to find a bathroom.

0:11.6

As you're hustling toward that blue porta potty in the distance,

0:15.3

you probably aren't thinking much about how it got there.

0:18.9

But behind every toilet, there's a guy or a gal with a dream.

0:25.7

I don't know anybody that when they're a kid, they grow up thinking I'm going to be in the

0:29.9

business when I grow up. That's Ron Inman. He's the vice president of Honeybucket, a portable

0:36.6

toilet company with operations in seven states.

0:40.1

It's not a fireman. It's not a doctor.

0:42.9

But when you roll up your sleeves and get into business and do it right, it's complex.

0:48.2

Honeybucket is one of thousands of companies in the U.S. that rents out portable toilets.

0:54.3

Operators deploy fleets of them to construction sites, music festivals, marathons, and natural disasters.

1:01.3

They haul them up mountaintops for the Winter Olympics and lower them into gold mines

1:06.1

2,000 feet below the earth's surface.

1:09.2

It can get complicated.

1:11.7

You have to get it there and then clean it every week perfectly, top to bottom. There's trucks.

1:17.3

There's people. There's supplies. There's parts. There's computer schedules. There's traffic.

1:23.0

There's just so many things every day have to be done well and done right.

1:27.9

There was a science behind everything from the number of toilets on each work site

1:32.0

to the scent of the blue liquid inside the tank.

1:35.5

And the job doesn't come with much glory.

1:42.6

The folks who are using a portable toilet don't always understand the expenses that go behind it or the value of the service and the product being offered.

...

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