Comment on This app lets restaurants and coffee shops charge to use the bathroom
frog@beehaw.org 5 months agoI’m in the UK, and where I live, it’s almost exclusively local council owned toilets that charge a fee. So these aren’t toilets inside private businesses, they’re separate buildings located in car parks, at beaches, and so on. So the fee to use them is almost certainly a combination of preventing homeless people from squatting in them (since they’re not watched over by staff) and to cover the costs of electricity, water, and sending someone over to clean them once in a while (since the majority of people using them are not residents of the area who have paid council tax).
MudMan@kbin.social 5 months ago
Right. That tracks with my experience. So when Americans are all weirded out by "paid toilets" in Europe, do they mean those? I always read that as them finding they had to pay for toilets in businesses or restaurants.
Deceptichum@kbin.social 5 months ago
I’m Australian and we’re also weirded out by paid toilets.
Any of them is what we think of it’s all weird, but it’s even worse when it’s a public toilet. At least a private business being shitty is their natural state.
frog@beehaw.org 5 months ago
In an ideal world, yes, the council-owned toilets would be free to use (and there’d be some mechanism for taxing tourism so the people that are using the beach and car park toilets are the ones paying for them). But I really do think Americans and Australians are overstating how common this is, because it really is a minority of toilets - I only actually know of two in my area, compared to dozens of other toilets that are completely free to use.
frog@beehaw.org 5 months ago
Yep, I’m assuming that’s what Americans get weirded out by. Which is just weird because it’s definitely a minority of toilets anyway. The vast majority of toilets in cafes, restaurants, bars, and large shops (or indeed any business where it’s normal to be there for more than 10-15 minutes) are either publically accessible and free to use, or can be accessed with permission. It’s generally frowned upon to walk into a business, use the toilet, and not buy something though, and even cafes and restaurants will only let you use the toilets if you buy at least one drink, so it could be that Americans are running into that.
There’s also a thing that only some businesses have toilets positioned in a place where customers can access them - obviously if it’s a tiny shop and the only toilet they have can only be reached by going through the stock room, they’re not going to let people just wander in and out (and may also be barred by their insurance policy from letting non-staff into the back rooms.) They might bend that rule for someone they know, but not for someone they don’t - in my home town, I know several businesses that would let me use their toilets in a pinch, but they wouldn’t let a complete stranger do so (they trust me not to nick stuff, or know where to find me if I do!) So there’s definitely a bunch of social conventions about when and where you can use a business’s toilets, which I can easily see Americans tripping over. As I understand it, the approach to customer service is quite different in the US compared to here.
admiralteal@kbin.social 5 months ago
At least for some, those are what are being discussed. In the US, it's totally normal for a places like large public parks to have totally free restroom facilities. I'm not sure I've ever encountered one with a paygate in the US. Not even in tourist traps.
I've come across more that have 9-5 staff like a security officer than ones that require payment.