The only reasonable reason I’ve heard is it makes it easier to clean/prevent mold growth. Like y’all don’t need to worry about drug users at the office.
You’d be surprised.
A combination of saving money and keeping people out of the bathroom.
You’re all complaining about the gaps, but I once walked into a bathroom which had 5ft doors. The moment I walked in I locked eyes with a guy taking a dump.
It’s so hard for people to make meaningful connection, these days, in our modern, tech-driven society.
I know everyone hates the gaps but like… I don’t care if you look at me using the bathroom, you might see my thigh, who cares? Also, you’re the creep looking, I’m not doing anything wrong, I’ve got zero reason to feel bad or weird about this interaction. We all go to the bathroom can we just stop being weird about it already?
Why not just not have gaps and have overlaps instead? Works in civilised countries. It’s not like the technology doesn’t exist.
It’s an invasion of people’s privacy when they feel most vulnerable. It’s no mystery why folk find it upsetting.
It seems like folks are either fine with shitting in the streets or can’t handle being seen.
I’m just not a fan of locking eyes with a dude in the midst of dropping a load
Lock eyes and grunt and push as hard as you can to establish dominance.
Let’s not forget the people who attempt to open the stall, notice that it is indeed locked, then proceed to knock on the door
“Wanna help me wipe bud? This one is particularly sticky, I need to eat some more beans”
I assume it’s because it’s cheap infrastructure.
Eventually, enshittification will hit public restrooms hard and we won’t even have dividers at all. Just a single, giant hole in the floor everyone is expected to pee and shit into while a bank of CCTV cameras watches every angle of the room.
Eventually? My high school didn’t have dividers and that was 30+ years ago. I feel like dividers are a product of the satanic/ homosexual panic.
I know of one rest stop that offers stalls with doors, but half of the door is removed so that they can see if someone is partaking of questionable substances in there.
I have heard of several, but that’s the only one I’ve seen myself.
I’ve seen signs for the truck stop showers saying only 1 person is allowed in a shower stall at a time that are clearly only there because dudes be fuckin’ in there.
Yeah, being literally as cheap as possible is the main design driver for poop stalls with large gaps. Very forgiving installation, so the cheapest possible labor can put them in to inconsistently built bathrooms with cheap parts using the least amount of materials on the cheapest hinges with the cheapest paint and cheap replacement parts when whatever is in there fails.
Also cheap to repair when it breaks.
Also, some amount of gap at the floor level means the whole room can be sloped down to a single drain when a toilet backs up instead of being contained in a single stall. That is also cheaper.
For all the puritanical shame Americans have of their sexual organs, we sure are lax when it comes to giving a little privacy when taking a shit and sometimes even just pissing in a trough.
It also feels somewhat ironic that US hosts/makes the largest amount of porn
ripping basic privacy trumps puritanical values.
It’s because of the puritanical shame- without those gaps, people might (gasp) have sex in bathroom stalls instead of doing their business as god intended.
I mean, walking by and seeing
How could you not?
My middle school didn’t even have doors on the stalls. That was f’d up.
Occasionally I hear people argue it’s so you can catch IV drug users without bursting in. Personally I think it’s that capitalism cares not for your happiness and it’s fractionally cheaper to have shitty doors, and so that’s what people do
No its not a profit saving thing. It makes no difference cost wise to save a few cms of wood. Its intentionally designed that way. Go to any other capitalist country than America and you won’t see gaps.
It makes no difference cost wise to save a few cms of wood.
The cost savings is not only in materials. For manufacturing, lower quality materials and larger tolerances. Time to install and repair is lower because of how open the design is. Time to clean is lower because you can just soak the floor and mop without worrying about each stalls’ corners.
Brutal efficiency at the cost of comfort and privacy is what capitalism is all about. The US is just used to it and somehow also incredibly puritanical.
That said, efficiency isn’t a bad thing. There are some countries with some bathrooms that don’t have stalls - legit indoor public bathrooms where you just squat over a hole or urinals that are just one long wide trough. It’s about what you are used to.
Nah I refuse to accept its for efficiency or cost savings. Thats so negligible no one would bring it up. Especially at the scale these are being constructed.
Ive seen a ton of arguments like “oh its to save costs installing if the floor is uneven” or “it gives leeway for different cuts” or “its for cleaning” but these are things can can easily be designed around without having a gap that leaves the user exposed. Either Americans are to stupid to design around this constraint (they aren’t) or theyre intentionally leaving it in for some reasons and there is plenty of speculation on the reasons.
You’re correct, those things are avoidable and can be designed around. However hiring the people who know how to do that also costs money and it’s cheaper to hire shitty engineers who do things safely instead of well. We’re not stupid, we’re exploitative
If you’re gonna build hundreds of thousands of bathrooms you can afford a decent engineer to make a door. Look at any other country, even the poor ones.
I don’t know about you but the vast majority of bathroom stalls I see do not use wood. They are almost all metal, and keeping metal from rubbing on metal in a high humidity environment seems like a cost saving measure to me
Its usually wood with metal edges. They dont rub because the hinge has a few mm of clearance. Even if they were to scape the metal should last plenty long and be treated for the environment its in.
Most places I see use a door frame and floor to ceiling walls but in stuff like schools.you still have the shitty stalls but the gaps are 1/10th the size they are im the us. Not enough to look through.
Toilets shouldn’t be high humidity environments (that’s what ventilation is there for) and gap-less doors don’t need to rub at all.
That’s what this European high tech that seems to be virtually unknown in the US is for: door rebates.
Uh, I know it’s because we’re unfortunately too close to the States but in Canada we have the same problem. It’s getting a little better, and we aren’t such babies about gender neutral bathrooms either, but we have our fair share of stall gaps.
I have doubts about the IV drug users. It would imply that bathroom stalls used to give privacy before IV drugs were a thing, and after indoor plumbing.
I suspect the posted “cheapness” posted elsewhere, or so managers can check who is “slacking off”. (Also so pervs can spy.)
I think it’s because bathrooms are cost, and so they got enshitified early to discourage costumers from using them.
But where are the costumers supposed to change costume if not in a stall?
I wish people who posted youtube links would say what they were linking to.
“youtube”
That is the only one I know because of the last three letters.
I’m fucking clicking that link so hard.
- Cheaper
- So they can be sure you’re not secksing or drugging
I’ve heard every excuse, from making sure people aren’t doing drugs, jerking off, or having sex in there. The assumption being that if people are given total privacy they’ll be up to “no good” in the bathroom stall. I don’t know if any of that is true, but I once went to the men’s room at a big-city library, and discovered the stall walls were only 4 feet tall. (If that was meant to prevent drug use it wasn’t working, there were a couple dudes in there doing the fenty lean, but I didn’t see anybody fucking, at least.)
So the non-private pooing is actually continuous with American moral puritanism. That makes sense.
And moral paranoia!
Public library where I grew up had full height stall walls, but the doors had been removed. There were always several homeless people shitting in there. But hey, at least they weren’t fucking, right?
Depends. What takes up a stall for longer, a good fuck or a good shit?
A good fuck should last much longer than a good shit…
I don’t know if any of that is true,
As someone who worked retail for many years when I was younger, I can assure you that it is absolutely true. People get up to insane shit in public restrooms.
The stalls at my work have zero gaps whatsoever and the door/walls (which are made of wood) go almost to the floor. There’s fairly high quality locking handles that indicate whether or not it’s occupied. It’s amazing and I don’t know of any other public restroom in my area like it.
It always baffles me that this is considered a luxury in the USA while in Germany (and I assume most of Europe) this is the absolute standard. Stalls where the door doesn’t lock properly or where the indicator on the outside is faded so that you can’t reliably determine if it’s occupied are already considered signs of bad maintenance. Gaps that you can look through without pressing your face right against them would be a “nope, I’ll never visit this place again” level scandal.
Really? That’s what I’d expect even in a run-down public toilet in a train station over here in Austria.
-over here in insert anywhere but the US.
Y’all have standards. Rights, even.
I am so jealous. My old work had stalls with gaps. The whole room was a bit tight, so you couldn’t just back up far enough to see the feet of the person in the stall. The locks were installed in such a way that if you pulled the door a little, it would open. (So a discreet soft pull on the door was not a good way of determining occupancy.)
The only way to know was to look in the gap.
I was about to go in a stall when I made eye contact with the current occupant of said stall. She just yelled out “YOU CREEPIN?”
I am of course not socially awkward at all and was completely normal when I replied back “no… Sorry.”
Actual privacy in a multi-stall bathroom would be so nice.
Why didn’t you try knocking? Knock twice 2 times, with a few seconds pause in between, if no response, then you can try the door. Going straight to looking into the gap is … creepy imo.
Edit: this was in reply to “The only way to know was to look in the gap.”. And no it wasn’t. Knock for fucks sake, have some manners.
The locks were installed in such a way that if you pulled the door a little, it would open. (So a discreet soft pull on the door was not a good way of determining occupancy.)
Maybe because of that?
Starting with pulling on the door is already impolite imo. If there is no visual cue as to the occupancy of the room, then the first thing one should do is knock. If the light is off or the occupancy signal says it’s free, then sure, try the handle. Otherwise knock first, give the person who is shitting there a chance to reply with “occupied” or to knock back. But looking through gaps or trying if the door opens with the handle and then going “oops sorry”, please no.
Same goes up for offices, meeting spaces, bedrooms etc, when the door is closed and it could be occupied, always knock before attempting to enter. Less bad when someone does it, but still, one could just knock.
Am I too non-USA to understand this?
This is a typical public restroom
Ah… so yes. And wow.
How much door fitting tolerance do you want?
All of it
All you need to know is that toilet stalls in the USA (and Canada) have huge gaps around the doors, unlike other countries. You have to carefully position your head so you’re not making accidental eye contact with people outside, and somehow relax knowing everyone can see you taking a shit.
I think they just suck at carpentry, amongst other things. Doors are haaaard.
Yeah, they don’t know how to make door rebates. They don’t even have that in their actual house doors leading to the road. And we over here even have them on toilet doors.
So trans women can be discovered, I suppose.
(Edit: immediately after posting this, it’s prolly way too dark but I’m leaving it there. Also it me, a trans woman terrified of using the stall for this exact reason.)
I’ve always believed that the whole stall concept was developed by some kind of pervert.
I mean, even when they grant proper visual privacy, that’s just one of our five senses. You can still hear and smell what’s going on next door - and I swear in some cases just about taste it.
To me, “privacy” means all senses.
Not to mention having weirdos peek over the top of the stall, which has happened.
As a man, can I just say that I have never enjoyed peeing shoulder to shoulder with other men.
It explains why there is the debate about which toilet to use for trans people. They can see the other sex naked. It would not be an issue if the doors didn’t have gaps.
