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Comment by simplestman | Hacker News Reader

Worked in gas station, tons of people stop just to use restrooms.

Worked at grocery stores and gas stations. A lot of people stopped just to use the restroom.

We also had homeless people use restrooms to bathe, and drug addicts use the bathroom as a place to quickly take a hit. Also had people defecate on the floor, write messages on the wall with feces, etc. Because of this, multiple places I worked didn't provide restroom access to the public. It sucks for people who simply and respectfully use the restroom. But at the same time (in one specific location at least), it was a matter of having to clean up fecal matter or drug paraphernalia or not letting the public use the restroom. My sub-living-wage job simply didn't pay me enough to put up with that crap.

That being said, if you let 'customers' use your restroom, you should let gig workers do the same. They aren't your direct customer, but show them a modicum of respect and dignity.

The local Safeway near me has one of the most repulsive bathrooms for this reason. There's no reason that you can't respectfully clean up your mess if you've made one.

This is one of those things in Europe that in my anecdotal experience works better: pay toilets. For some reason all the bathrooms I had to pay for in England, Germany and Belgium were clean. The larger ones at Christmas Markets even had bathroom attendants, so any problems or cleanup were immediately addeseed.

It's unfortunately the base level of civility has fallen to the point where you can't just walk in most public places and use a restroom any more. Definitely one of those cases of a few people ruining it for everyone else.

Pay toilets were common in the US up until the 70s

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets...

If someone proposed pay toilets in my town vocal citizens who have never done a thing for the homeless except express “compassion” from afar would be up in arms because of how unfair that would be to the homeless; as if the presence of pay toilets would somehow be more unfair to the homeless who are already various levels of creative in dealing with the problem. So the status quo remains because we haven’t solved homelessness.

Yeah it's called slactivism - if you can send thoughts and prayers and do a little social media virtue signaling well job done and you didn't have to leave the house.

For a long time this sort of worked for both sides as the bathroom foot traffic would often buy some small item in the store and most items sold at gas stations have a hefty markup. Buying a Coke for $3 might net as much profit for the gas station as buying $30 of gas. Besides, the gas station can never tell if you're going to buy gas and just want to pee first.

Since the pandemic, a lot of gas stations summarily closed their bathrooms - even to customers. It sucks.

When I used to commute a long distance to work, I had 3 strategic restroom locations along my route - a Target, a gas station, and a catholic church.

In all the long-distance traveling my wife and I have done over the past twenty years here in the US, we quickly got into the habit of locating every McDonalds and Starbucks anywhere close to the route we would be taking. They have traditionally had the best quality bathrooms, and we didn’t mind buying some food or drink while we were there.

The problem came when Starbucks started opening “stores” inside of Target. Those were really hard to detect in the app, and Target bathrooms are not nearly so nice.

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