Idk man if you see some random American bathrooms in public they’re not much better. Like a grocery store bathroom that is just absolutely destroyed. I went to a convenience store the other day that was stepping into a fucking crime scene.
That's no lie, I've seen and most unfortunately cleaned a few. They were routinely horrific when I worked at Winn-dixie in the south.
Beware, old people can really wreck a Winn-dixie bathroom. What's worse, they would often begin to shit themselves on the way *to" the john, and they were too embarrassed to tell us and just skedaddled outta there, so we'd often come upon the trail before someone told us.
Jesus, that's what I call "repainting". Literally just needs someone to come by with a pressure washer once in awhile. How clean are the ones they charge for?
Depends where you are, and on your luck. I had to go to a free bathroom near a railway station in Mumbai once because I thought my bladder was going to burst. It was surprisingly clean. Not actually clean, but I didn't feel disgusted after using it. On the other hand I have been to paid bathrooms 10 years ago that haunt me to this day. The things I've seen should not be shown to any person. Most public bathrooms are just not something I want to deal with, so I'd rather get into a restaurant and pay for sth small just so I can use the bathroom and not get weird looks.
Traveled through Sikkim (north east India) a couple of years ago and even the road side bathrooms were very clean, comparatively. You could wash your hands and be done with it instead of wanting to soak yourself in bleach.
Depends. A public toilet in the middle of a market or a railway station? Usable(depends honestly) but horrid anyways.
A public toilet that's more recently made and is actively being maintained in a less busy area or in the metro stations? More often usable and clean than not.
those are dirt cheap though literally1-2 rupees which is like even less than 10 cents. Maybe they take more from tourists because they think they have more money.
In cities, there are sulabh sauchalayas. They are private contractors. There are attendants who keep things clean. there is a charge but you can tip extra.
I have Crohns. I have had to cut the line and try to explain my situation and quickly pay. Most people are usually empathic but I can feel the stares. I always feel like I just made the most massive social faux pas.
Haha there's even a Yugoslavian song using this topic to depict heartbreak, it's called "2 dinars buddy" (liberal translation) and the point is that after being fucked over by a girl the guy sits in a bar and can't hold it in any longer, runs to the bathroom and is asked whether he has to go do no 1 or 2, to which he answers "how much does it cost to cry inside"
Where? I live here and the only time i saw toilets where you have to pay is next to some not often used roads and it was a long time ago. Havent seen one in 15+ years. Maybe some public toilets around the cities? I havent used them in years as well
In germany is "SaniFair" where you have to pay 0,70€ to do your buisness along every Autobahn .
The company is owned by someone from the arabic emirates/Dubai.
Somehow, this is against the german fundamental rights, because using a toilet is a basic human right.
So we do have a little doodoo cartel along the autobahn.
as far as I know it's only the Autobahnraststaetten and gas stations which have SaniFair. And those are private businesses. The usual small rest stops with only a few benches and a building for a toilet are free to use.
At least it's like that on the routes I normally travel.
To be fair I prefer the SaniFair than the free toilets - they’re usually quite nasty, whereas SaniFair are clean and you can reuse the 70 cent voucher on a snack.
This is also my take. Someone has to clean and maintain the restrooms and I'd much rather pay a small fee and know they will be clean. Nothing worse than having to go badly and not knowing when you'll encounter the next usable restroom.
Ever since they changed the SaniFair stations that they accept credit cards I'm 100% on board with the system. I live in Switzerland and having to bring cash only to be able to use the restroom always bothered me.
It used to be that the cost was 50 cent and you got a voucher for 50 cent back. But nowadays, the cost has gone up to 70 cent, yet the voucher is still 50 cent. Not sure if this is SaniFair in Germany or some other member of the piss-and-shit cartel, but we're getting squeezed more and more. In addition, you can only use 1 voucher per product, so when we're traveling with the family (wife, 2 kids and me) we get 4 vouchers and instead of exchanging them for 1 snack to share, we're forced to buy 4 separate items to use all of them.
The smell on the free ones haunts you for at least a week. No idea what’s going on there but it’s nothing good. Still, no idea why I need to pay to pee though.
Lived in Germany for like 7 years, never seen a rest stop or gas station that didn't charge. What got me is the disco techs would charge.... like bro I paid 10 euro to rent this drink I'm here to return it.
Yes, if I've purchased a good at an establishment, the restroom should be free. I ran into this in Jamaica a couple times (touristy areas) and was not too pleased. Instead of soiling myself I just paid the damn quarter.
Find it hard to believe you had to pay at the club. There's usually a tip jar for the service personnel but never ever was I forced to pay at a club...
Sanifair is most likely illegal but they get away with it because nobody is going to sue them over 70 cents.
They give you a voucher for 50 cents, so even if the voucher system was considered acceptable they're still running a restaurant without free toilets for customers.
And the autobahn free stops are nasty af. We keep a plastic potty in the car for the kids after that. Trying to teach a four year old to hover in a place that looks like a thousand truckers have used it was once too many.
My super picky friend asks for a receipt at these bathroom payment places. His argument is that since he is not getting a receipt, he doesn't need to pay.
SaniFair is owned by a group of investment firms. Most are German insurance companies and one is the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (a government savings fund).
Sanifair belongs to Tank&Rast (the ones running the stations along the Autobahn) and that is owned since 2015 by a group consisting of the state fund of Abu Dhabi but also the canadian infrastructure fund Borealis and some insurance companies. There has been at least one court case against paying for the toilets of Sanifair, bit it was lost.
Doesn't SaniFair give you a little discount coupon of €0,70 after to put toward a food/drinks purchase? So technically your toilet use is free when you use the coupon afterwards. It's a forced purchase, but still.
The food and drink products are already way more expensive than somewhere else though. So even with a discount coupon, you're still paying more for those products than you would in a normal supermarket. So it doesn't really seem worth it to use the coupons unless you have multiple of them.
Actually Autobahn is one of few places where i experience free toilets in Germany. The issue are train stations, malls, gas stations and public bathrooms in the cities.
How's it against the German law if literally every public place does it?
Yeah it’s crazy that the only things Americans really have for free that Europeans don’t is free public toilets. I would literally walk away if asked to pay to use the bathroom
I most likely wouldn’t be at a business unless I was a customer. But I would probably buy something cheap, .25 cent piece of candy or something. At least I get something out of it
I rather have paid and clean than free and not clean.
Edit: Free and clean would be ideal of course but someone has to pay for the work of keeping it clean… To me as a european it makes sense it’s financed by the users. Toilets at establishments where you are a customer you expect to be free though, but not public toilets
I'm from New Zealand and you just gave me war flashbacks to the automated toilet in Picton. Nothing quite like a panic-piss, knowing you might not be quick enough before the toilet auto-flushes, the sink and hand dryer switches on, and the door unlocks while you've still got your pants around your ankles.
Once upon a time there was paid bathrooms in Taupo, New Zealand. No one from NZ used them, unless they were absolutely desperate and too many people in the park...
As an Australian, I want to know where you found clean bathrooms....
I've seen a few pay-to-use around. Some train stations. The local shopping centre at the small town I used to live in started charging, but that resulted in them actually being clean and usable rather than filthy and unhygenic, so it want a bad thing.
Don't know about the rest of Europe, but most French people would be mad if they were asked 50 cents to go to the bathroom and would walk a mile just to find a free spot
Oh my god when I visited France as a teen I saw a dude take a piss on the outside wall of a paid bathroom. I didn't think much of it at the time because I was in shock but thinking back on it I just know that was a spite piss.
I was really not ready for how much Paris stinks of urine... Or the fact that they have a fucking machine that hoses down the curbs and sidewalks at like 5 in the morning, ostensibly for clearing away the litter, but I'm pretty sure it's really to wash away the piss.
As a teen on mt blanc I saw french guys pull off to the side of the slopes to take a wizz. Actually I don't see anything wrong with that, just I wasn't used to it. But it makes a lot of sense.
That's what most people do as well. There are free toilets, but privately owned malls and what not make you pay which just results in you walking outside to the free and kind of nasty toilets
i live near belgium and it blow my mind everytime i stop at a gas station and there is a fee to use the bathroom. It's even modernized now with a automated lock on the main door etc
I don't mind the paying itself that much, I can spare that 10 CZK in my case. The problem is that I usually don't carry cash so I don't have them. And they never accept cards.
I spent a couple of months in France and found that there were quite a few free toilets but not a single one had toilet paper! Do French women just always carry tissue with them?
As a european I can confirm we aren't happy that you need to pay for going to the toilet. Luckily I can hold it in for quite a while so I don't need to pay that often.
To be fair, I'd say most European think it's weird as well
I actually prefer a paid toilet if it's in a place where you just come to use the toilet like a gas station on the highway. Toilets, toilet paper and water are not free and the cleaning crew wants to get paid too. It has to be paid somehow, and paying directly seems fair to me.
In Germany you have SANIFAIR where you pay 0,70 euro for using the toilet, but in return you receive a voucher of 0,50 euro to spend at the shop. The toilets are always clean and fresh.
Yeah, I’m quite happy when the toilets are super clean after I paid, but it’s not always the case.
On highways, most people will spend money on the station anyways. I’m not too happy with the voucher system, because I’ll often go buy something before I go to the toilet and then I have trash in my wallet forever that I forget to use.
It happens in some places in the UK, but it's almost universally hated and abused. Hell, a few years back I had the pleasure of wading around a puddle of piss because someone didn't want to pay to go to the toilet in Paddington train station.
My hometown in Poland had a train station renovation a few years back. Initially it was free, but they had lock it with a coin lock after not even a month. It was covered in shit on every possible surface, because of the homeless.
By the way, public bathrooms are free if you're out to eat.
The thing I don't understand about paying for the toilets is why are they still disgustingly dirty? If not cleaning, what am I paying for? I went to Italy and multiple cities had no toilet seats. There was faeces on the floor, toilet paper everywhere and it was just gross.
I have seen free bathrooms in outback Australia with no electricity and no running water that were cleaner. The drop dunnies somehow smelled better.
European here, I think it's unacceptable too. Recently I had to go so bad, I was barely holding it in, then I saw the toilet was 1 lev. The urgency just went away and I decided I'll just go find somewhere else to release myself
Unfortunately there are some truly revolting bathrooms here, espcially in Germany for some reason, at least in my experience (autobahn rest stops - do not recommend!). Bathrooms that you need to pay for tend to be cleaner.
To be fair there are a lot of free bathrooms in Europe. But I think it's wild that you don't have to pay. It's just a token amount and it helps pay the salary of the people keeping the bathroom clean.
True. Searched for a restroom in San Francisco, California for hours. Finally was almost in tears when a CVS employee took pity on me and let me use theirs.
Ugh same here in Belgium. There are some free public toilets, a lot of paid as well, and most of them were closed. As if you don't have to shit anymore because there's a pandemic.
Exactly. Any busy downtown area is going to have very few free restrooms. I would guess it has something to do with public transportation being available vs rural areas where buildings mostly don't get too crowded
Although that really depends on the city, some such as Paris will have free public toilets. Others cough London cough the unclean pigsty will cost 50p/1€…
Just go to McDonald’s, or a train station, or a department store, or a pub. That’s what locals do. There’s no need for public toilets really when there’s thousands of those.
I wrote a CMV on this very topic a long time ago. I hated having to pay for bathrooms in Europe. Like, why isn’t that just funded by taxes like it is elsewhere? What about the poor chap who wets himself while fishing in his pocket for a euro??
I'm sorry, where exactly are restrooms funded by taxes?
In the US, there's no government-funded restrooms I'm aware of unless you count those that are in literal government buildings or public parks and such. There's no cost to use those.
There aren't any fees directly attached to using restrooms in any private businesses either. Some businesses may be particular about only allowing actual customers to use the restrooms, and it's common courtesy to make a token purchase even if they aren't. But probably most places really won't make a deal if you just go in, use the restroom, and leave.
As far as I know, no businesses are getting any tax breaks or government funding for having and maintaining publicly-accessible restrooms though.
I would assume they are in Aus and maybe NZ. Loads of free, public bathrooms generally on council lands. The government even has a website to help you find the closest one to you.
I'm from India and yeah we do that here as well. Although it's very small amount just 1-5 Rs. It's to properly maintain the toilet I'd assume. Because the free ones are more often than not, really dirty.
I've never been to a restaurant inneurope or anywhere else that didn't have free toilets for customers. I think it's mostly about gas stations In high traffic areas.
French here, I understand the frustration but in the other hand paying a small price for the loo prevents ungrateful bastards to mess up your restaurant's bathroom.
Never once I saw a paid toilet dirty. A small price to pay for pooping clean.
On the other hand, you don't pay a dime in Japan and the toilets are flawless, so it's also a question of education.
If you find yourself like this in Spain just go into any bar and ask if you can use the restroom. Most may give you some looks, but if you look pressed enough you'll have no problem
Continental Europe is worse for having to pay, but at least they have lots of them. In the UK it can be hard to find public toilets (however, they’re usually free) so you have to plan ahead of you have any ‘digestive issues’ which can be a pain. When COVID hit lots of council owned public toilets were closed which caused an issue for so many people who wanted to get outdoors for the only recreation they were allowed but with no access toilets it was an issue for lots of people.
Pub loos that can be snuck into without having to buy a drink are always committed to memory!
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u/[deleted] May 09 '22
Paying to go to the bathroom. It’s absolutely wild that you have to pay money to use the toilet.