We do that because our country is founded on the “right” for moneymakers to put as much onto the customer as they can get away with. Hence things like tipping culture.
It’s not about doing it right for most. It’s about saving every dime you can. There are some that properly enclose stalls, like a nationally known Magic card seller in my locale.
I think the toilet wall thing is because we have an expectation that every public building must have public toilets available. Places don’t want you to fuck or shoot up in the bathrooms, so they make them un-private so you hurry the hell up and leave. It’s a bit of hostile architecture, like making park benches that you can’t lie down on to keep people from trying to sleep on them. Make the “undesirables” uncomfortable enough and maybe they’ll go be undesirable somewhere else. Meanwhile it’s just a little bit less nice for everyone else as well.
This is a thoughtful reply. I will just say that the UK also has public toilets all over the place, and a desire for people to not screw & get high in the cubicles. Ditto many other countries. But I’ve never been anywhere else with this door gap problem, where no-one gets privacy.
I did once use a UK bathroom in a supermarket where the lighting was all blue, which makes it hard to find a vein to inject. But the doors still closed properly.
I’m still not sure why there’s a regional difference, my guess is that it’s a quirk of history. We’re more used to it in the US, and there are benefits for the owners of the public toilets, so they don’t change.
How did we get so used to it? I’m no toilet historian but it could be a (horrible, evil) company had a near monopoly on stall design during a formative part of our architectural history. Could just be the newness and utilitarianism of a lot of American architecture in general. We kind of sprung up overnight and so sometimes bad ideas got caught up in that wave of “progress” and became the norm due to being in the right place at the right time, and not really because they were good ideas or ideas that worked. Tipping culture, tax added at the till, and other weird Americanisms could all have similar root causes! Once you’ve gone down the route of something pro-business and anti-consumer, and gotten most people to accept it as normal, there’s no going back in a capitalist society.
I’ve seen this conversation many times on Reddit, and from what people say I assume there is a regional thing going on on. I’m from a part of the US where toilet stalls do not have massive gaps. There is a big gap at the bottom but too low for anyone to be seeing under unless they are crawling on the floor. Gaps along the sides are quite narrow. 1 cm at most, and nothing anyone is going to be seeing you through unless they are some kind of freak putting their eye right up to it. These stalls are prefab panels you can easily put into a room. The gaps mean ventilation for the room takes care the stalls too.
I assume stalls started this way and became normalized, and in some parts of the country they’ve gotten sloppier, and sloppier, and normalized these huge gaps I hear people describe but never see.
This might be my bias, but I assume these are the places where everything is a suburban stripmall wasteland, where there are no sidewalks, and where it seems to me the whole environment is increasingly dehumanized.
Thank you for your comment. I can’t speak for the entire world, but in the UK a 1 cm" gap in the door of a public toilet would be massive and unacceptable. It’s not enough that someone can only see into a stall through a gap in the door if they are “right up to it”; they should not be able to see in at all. Public toilets in other countries have doors with gaps you can’t leer through at all.
Re. the “gaps meaning ventilation”, surely the “big gap at the bottom” and the fact that the whole top is open will be contributing more to ventilation?
You say you think this might be a regional thing in the US. Okay, could be. I have personally encountered this issue in Washington, California, North Carolina, DC, Massachusetts, Georgia, Texas, Oregon, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland.
I can understand that to someone not used to this, any gap at all might be troubling and one might tend to exaggerate it as “massive”.
However note that these walls are fairly thick which narrows any visibility angles considerably. So to really see someone through the gap you would have to be at exactly the right angle and looking straight at them. Sitting on the toilet in one of these you can see some really narrow strip of the sinks area which also reflects the areas in which someone would have to be and looking straight at you to see you. People at the sink area have their back to you. People walking past them to another stall, are not looking to the side.
I’m not trying to convince you that they are ideal, or that your should like them, just that when the gaps are pretty narrow it is not as big a deal as you might think to get used to.
Again this is assuming these gaps are pretty narrow. I get the impression from what some Americans have said in other discussion that in some places they are quite a bit wider than I am used to, and what I said above may no longer apply.
Oh, I absolutely believe that people in America can accept it’s “not as big a deal as you might think”.
This is a thread about things about America that make no sense. So: I don’t understand why America, seemingly uniquely, accepts this as “not a big deal”.
It’s weird. Land of the free, home of the public toilets strangers can see inside. So odd.
The US doesn’t have a VAT, but a sales tax on final sale of a good. Not only that, but states, counties, and cities can issue their own sales tax on sales within their borders. There are also cases where sales tax isn’t charged at the register. In the end, it is easier for companies to just charge the tax at the end, so they do.
There are these mystical things called computers, that are very good at computing things. So when printing the price you can automatically compute it into the labels.
So instead of calculating the price once and putting it on the sign, they calculate it every time a customer shows up at the register. Sure sounds way easier.
Again, they calculated the price at the checkout, so they could also have done it for the price tag. It is not a valid excuse in the slightest. Its only purpose is to obfuscate the actual price of an item and confuse the customer about the actual price of an item.
Many cities and counties often put a SPLOST (Special Purpose Local Option Tax) on the ballot. Usually for roads or schools, usually voted for, usually a penny. They are for a limited time, then they may expire or be put on the ballot again. If they expire, then every price tag for every item, in every store is now wrong. And if both city and county expire at different times, you could get a nightmare of changes.
Easier to change the software at checkout for the changes rather than every price tag.
It’s not that it’s easier it’s that it allows the companies to gouge you. If the store said the bottle of coke was 2.15 instead of 1.99 you might realize that it’s not a good price for acidic sugar water and pick something else. Like the free water out of the faucet. This also means public water would be higher quality because people would actually use it and demand cleaner water.
Sticker price isn’t the price you pay at the till. Why? Why do you do that.
Massive gaps between the walls and doors of public lavatory cubicles. This is not some mystical, advanced technology. Get it together.
We do that because our country is founded on the “right” for moneymakers to put as much onto the customer as they can get away with. Hence things like tipping culture.
No offense but how thick do you have to be to make a door that is put in place solely to shield you from other humans, have a massive gap?
It seriously boggles my mind.
It’s not about doing it right for most. It’s about saving every dime you can. There are some that properly enclose stalls, like a nationally known Magic card seller in my locale.
I don’t understand the question O:
Why
Oh, that. Because nobody gives a fuck about anybody’s rights in this country unless that person has a reasonable ability to sue.
or a reasonable probability to draw a gun.
What am I looking at here?
The inside of a toilet stall. As you can see it has a massive design flaw from top to bottom. That seems to be the norm in the grand ol’ US of A.
Ahhhhh now I get it, thanks. It was a hard perspective to catch up on without the explanation :)
They deliberately do that in some public toilets to discourage people from hooking up in there.
I think the toilet wall thing is because we have an expectation that every public building must have public toilets available. Places don’t want you to fuck or shoot up in the bathrooms, so they make them un-private so you hurry the hell up and leave. It’s a bit of hostile architecture, like making park benches that you can’t lie down on to keep people from trying to sleep on them. Make the “undesirables” uncomfortable enough and maybe they’ll go be undesirable somewhere else. Meanwhile it’s just a little bit less nice for everyone else as well.
This is a thoughtful reply. I will just say that the UK also has public toilets all over the place, and a desire for people to not screw & get high in the cubicles. Ditto many other countries. But I’ve never been anywhere else with this door gap problem, where no-one gets privacy.
I did once use a UK bathroom in a supermarket where the lighting was all blue, which makes it hard to find a vein to inject. But the doors still closed properly.
American here. I like your response and the one you responded to. Thanks for this insight. ^^
Pleasant interaction ^ Thank you.
I’m still not sure why there’s a regional difference, my guess is that it’s a quirk of history. We’re more used to it in the US, and there are benefits for the owners of the public toilets, so they don’t change.
How did we get so used to it? I’m no toilet historian but it could be a (horrible, evil) company had a near monopoly on stall design during a formative part of our architectural history. Could just be the newness and utilitarianism of a lot of American architecture in general. We kind of sprung up overnight and so sometimes bad ideas got caught up in that wave of “progress” and became the norm due to being in the right place at the right time, and not really because they were good ideas or ideas that worked. Tipping culture, tax added at the till, and other weird Americanisms could all have similar root causes! Once you’ve gone down the route of something pro-business and anti-consumer, and gotten most people to accept it as normal, there’s no going back in a capitalist society.
I’ve seen this conversation many times on Reddit, and from what people say I assume there is a regional thing going on on. I’m from a part of the US where toilet stalls do not have massive gaps. There is a big gap at the bottom but too low for anyone to be seeing under unless they are crawling on the floor. Gaps along the sides are quite narrow. 1 cm at most, and nothing anyone is going to be seeing you through unless they are some kind of freak putting their eye right up to it. These stalls are prefab panels you can easily put into a room. The gaps mean ventilation for the room takes care the stalls too.
I assume stalls started this way and became normalized, and in some parts of the country they’ve gotten sloppier, and sloppier, and normalized these huge gaps I hear people describe but never see.
This might be my bias, but I assume these are the places where everything is a suburban stripmall wasteland, where there are no sidewalks, and where it seems to me the whole environment is increasingly dehumanized.
Thank you for your comment. I can’t speak for the entire world, but in the UK a 1 cm" gap in the door of a public toilet would be massive and unacceptable. It’s not enough that someone can only see into a stall through a gap in the door if they are “right up to it”; they should not be able to see in at all. Public toilets in other countries have doors with gaps you can’t leer through at all.
Re. the “gaps meaning ventilation”, surely the “big gap at the bottom” and the fact that the whole top is open will be contributing more to ventilation?
You say you think this might be a regional thing in the US. Okay, could be. I have personally encountered this issue in Washington, California, North Carolina, DC, Massachusetts, Georgia, Texas, Oregon, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland.
I can understand that to someone not used to this, any gap at all might be troubling and one might tend to exaggerate it as “massive”.
However note that these walls are fairly thick which narrows any visibility angles considerably. So to really see someone through the gap you would have to be at exactly the right angle and looking straight at them. Sitting on the toilet in one of these you can see some really narrow strip of the sinks area which also reflects the areas in which someone would have to be and looking straight at you to see you. People at the sink area have their back to you. People walking past them to another stall, are not looking to the side.
I’m not trying to convince you that they are ideal, or that your should like them, just that when the gaps are pretty narrow it is not as big a deal as you might think to get used to.
Again this is assuming these gaps are pretty narrow. I get the impression from what some Americans have said in other discussion that in some places they are quite a bit wider than I am used to, and what I said above may no longer apply.
Oh, I absolutely believe that people in America can accept it’s “not as big a deal as you might think”.
This is a thread about things about America that make no sense. So: I don’t understand why America, seemingly uniquely, accepts this as “not a big deal”.
It’s weird. Land of the free, home of the public toilets strangers can see inside. So odd.
The US doesn’t have a VAT, but a sales tax on final sale of a good. Not only that, but states, counties, and cities can issue their own sales tax on sales within their borders. There are also cases where sales tax isn’t charged at the register. In the end, it is easier for companies to just charge the tax at the end, so they do.
There are these mystical things called computers, that are very good at computing things. So when printing the price you can automatically compute it into the labels.
Nowadays, yes. However, that wasn’t always the case. People got used to tax not being included and there has never been a big push to change that.
So instead of calculating the price once and putting it on the sign, they calculate it every time a customer shows up at the register. Sure sounds way easier.
Or they print out consistent signs across a region, advertise to it, and take care of the sales tax to handle it.
Again, they calculated the price at the checkout, so they could also have done it for the price tag. It is not a valid excuse in the slightest. Its only purpose is to obfuscate the actual price of an item and confuse the customer about the actual price of an item.
And what is I’m tax exempt? Now the price isn’t right for me…
That is a nonsensical excuse. If they can calculate the price at the checkout then they can calculate it when they are putting up the price tags.
Many cities and counties often put a SPLOST (Special Purpose Local Option Tax) on the ballot. Usually for roads or schools, usually voted for, usually a penny. They are for a limited time, then they may expire or be put on the ballot again. If they expire, then every price tag for every item, in every store is now wrong. And if both city and county expire at different times, you could get a nightmare of changes.
Easier to change the software at checkout for the changes rather than every price tag.
It’s not that it’s easier it’s that it allows the companies to gouge you. If the store said the bottle of coke was 2.15 instead of 1.99 you might realize that it’s not a good price for acidic sugar water and pick something else. Like the free water out of the faucet. This also means public water would be higher quality because people would actually use it and demand cleaner water.