Toilet paper is only available if you scan the train station QR code | Hacker News Reader

Toilet paper is only available if you scan the train station QR code

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China typically does not provide toilet paper in public restrooms. In some of the international tourist spots, they tried giving away toilet paper and locals would steal it. So they put in facial recognition and QR codes to dispense it. Source:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np4OwQaJItY

In rich & populated cities public restrooms are numerous, clean, more often than not 'occidental' (non-squat), and toilet paper is often provided w/o any special dispenser.

Source: I live in Shanghai.

I've traveled around China a few times and while my purpose was not to complete a comprehensive toilet census, I only ever found toilet paper in public restrooms in Shanghai (excluding restrooms of nice restaurants). Shanghai also felt like the most expensive city.

Same in Mexico. A person standing outside will sell you some though.

The right to free TP is not entirely universal

Toilet paper is generally not provided in public toilets in China. You should carry your own. So in a way, this is positive.

> You should carry your own.

Why don't they make paying toilets where you can have such services without the hassle of carrying stuff?

Probably they don't consider it a hassle, because they are just used to it. Pay toilets sounds like an expensive, complicated solution.

It's not a terrible idea to carry around tissues anyway.

There used to be paid toilet back in the day, but disappeared somehow, maybe because nobody wants to be manning those toilets.

In the United States many areas passed laws banning them:

https://psmag.com/economics/dont-pay-toilets-america-bathroo...

Quite true.

People can be very disingenuous when they want to. So while requiring QR codes is ridiculous, they should note that normally you’re expected to have your own toilet paper because toilets aren’t stocked with it.

If people were required to give the full back story of every trivial absurdity they encountered "in the wild" the world would turn into a very boring place.

This isn't entirely a trivial absurdity. One of the biggest things I hear about traveling in China (and Japan) is that you're expected to carry your own toilet paper everywhere.

An analogy would be – someone from a non-tipping country complains about the fact that some restaurants in the US have a "compulsory gratuity" of 20% for larger parties. Sure, somewhat outrageous, but less so if you consider that tipping 15-20% is the norm in the US anyway.

I lived in Japan for 2 years, and only came across no TP three or four times. I've heard that it used to be like that 10 or 20 years ago, but now even in more rural areas it is provided. There are often toilets equipped with bidets... Was a bit of a shock when my first day there I used a toilet in a 7-11, went to flush, and accidentally hit the bidet controls...

A reporter in China tweets to people who choose to follow a reporter in China and you accuse her of being disingenuous for failing to accommodate it being posted on an international website, out of context.

That's quite self-centred.

Obviously she was looking to engage locals by writing in English (which has very low penetration) on a platform that’s normally inaccessible to locals... I think context is owed the reader.

Well firstly, you as a reader did actually know the context. That's why you could tell everyone else.

Secondly, giving that context requires the writer to know that it's not normal. If it's not normal. Yet you've failed to give that context. Your comment could just as easily be linked to in a forum mainly used by Hong Kongers or Singaporeans. Obviously, you have no reason to accommodate them because you shouldn't expect them to be your audience.

Isn't this just the high-tech version of for-customers-only restrooms, which is not such an uncommon thing AFAIK? For instance in McDonalds in Belgrade, Serbia you have to scan the barcode from the receipt to open the door of the toilet, which I always thought was a very neat solution.

I happen to be in Belgrade right now, and the McDonalds I've been today didn't have any barrier at the restroom. There was a keypad to enter a PIN, but the door opened without a PIN.

In Munich, there were human staff at the gate collecting 50 cents to use the toilet, and that's the weirdest McDonalds restroom I've been to so far.

The difference is that the McDonalds only makes sure you've actually paid, and doesn't try to stalk your toilet habits nor links them to your social media accounts.

Do the Twitter TOS allow mandatory follows like this?

As an aside: Toilet paper is an ancient, inefficient, and doubtfully hygienic way of cleaning your backside in the modern world.

Start using bidets instead of this nonsense. The TP can still be used for drying purposes.

I have bidets/washlets installed in my home, and the only problem has been that I now can't go back. Whenever I travel I now have to carry around wet wipes or I don't feel clean. But wet wipes are apparently horrible for the environment.

I can't win.

The problem with wet wipes is mostly that they should never, absolutely never, be flushed. Wet wipes combine with fat in the sewers, and form the basis of an ever growing deposit of solid mass that will inevitably block the sewer (or pipes if you are unlucky and the stuff builds up at an earlier point).

When these deposits grow in size they are known as fatbergs. In London they have had to remove fatbergs the size of double-decker buses, but it's a global problem.

If you use wet wipes, the rule is simple: deposit them in the trash can — just like period products and nappies.

Don't bother believing the 'flushable' wipes lie: all wipes are flushable for sure, but they all contribute to the problem, and none disintegrate before they mix with fat to become a potentially very expensive problem.

Maybe plumbing needs a general upgrade from being simply gravity assisted, to something like this

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_disposal_unit

which shreds anything to tiny pieces, which then again can flow freely, instead of being stuck somewhere?

What is more expensive? Cleaning out fatbergs, or have something like this installed at whichever 'layer' in the plumbing, or making bidets mandatory?

(Err...1st world problems while elsewhere many peoply shit who knows where...)

> if you use wet wipes, the rule is simple: deposit them in the trash can — just like period products and nappies.

In most of south asia you are not even supposed to flush normal toilet paper, the waste systems there just cannot handle it.

I don’t actually like bidets or similar solutions, as they don’t clean as thoroughly as wet wipes IMO.

Personally I just always carry wet wipes, and always use them, and always have. Can’t live without them, and can’t imagine how others can tbh.

> as they don’t clean as thoroughly as wet wipes IMO

Once you have a bidet, your regular TP is equivalent to a wet wipe.

If you're using the ones that are almost cloth-like strength, those really shouldn't be flushed down most sewage systems, even if they're marked as supposedly "flushable": https://www.today.com/series/one-small-thing/are-flushable-w...

> If you're using the ones that are almost cloth-like strength, those really shouldn't be flushed down most sewage systems, even if they're marked as supposedly "flushable"

I have a kind of wet-wipes which are almost cloth-like strength, but dissolve into just a milky jelly liquid if they are in water for a few minutes (I’ve checked products tests first before choosing this specific brand, they even dissolve fast enough to work in train toilets without clogging them up, if you wait a bit before flushing).

NDR Markt has tested different brands available at German stores in 2016, and showed quite extreme differences, while some products had already mostly dissolved after 10 minutes, others were after 3 hours still without any change: https://www.ndr.de/ratgeber/verbraucher/Wie-Feuchttuecher-di...

I had considered getting a bidet until I read this article from UC Berkeley. I’d love to hear some counterpoints to their arguments though!

https://www.berkeleywellness.com/self-care/preventive-care/a...

That article doesn't say not to get a bidet.

It outlines two specific cases of when not to use it but that's about it.

The counter-arguments listed in that article are shallow to say the least.

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