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Shameless plug: I developed a site to help with this in my city Winnipeg called Winnipee. It went viral last summer and had a flurry of activity with community
by thrusong 3y ago
Shameless plug: I developed a site to help with this in my city Winnipeg called Winnipee.
It went viral last summer and had a flurry of activity with community contributions (locations, updates). Winter came, traffic levelled off, and it didn't spike again this summer (though it has remained stable).
I tried to track whether it was OK to use the washroom without a purchase, wheelchair accessibility, size. When I worked at McDonald's, an executive told me they wanted their customers to know there was always a bathroom they could use anywhere in the world even if they weren't making a purchase this visit.
AFAIK, Starbucks had a similar policy for a long time.
It was interesting to see how some locations featured immediately locked down their washrooms.
I had a Tim Hortons franchise owner email me and freak out, so we marked her location as "purchase required."
It's been pretty brutal here with the meth crisis, though, so I also get it.
At the end of the day, I would love for our governments to provide taxpayer funded facilities around the city and even on several of our major highways. We used to have a lot here but they closed almost all of them.
You can check it out: https://www.winnipee.com https://www.winnipee.com
- lazyasciiart 3y agoMcDonalds in the US 1000% does not have bathrooms available to non-customers. Was that a long time ago, or is that actually the policy in Canada today?
- bonniemuffin 3y agoYeah I've been in many urban US McDonalds where the bathrooms are locked and you need to get a code from the cashier to get into them.
- ghaff 3y agoI can't speak to in US cities (where indeed restaurants tend to police non-customer restroom use more regularly) but I've never had an issue with using a McDonald's restroom when I've been driving someplace in the US.
- notacoward 3y agoSame experience here. Just got back from a six-day driving trip where my wife and I used McDonalds restrooms without issue multiple times. Some of them were even quite nice, as such things go. But I've also found myself in dire straits in cities, with nothing truly public and the McDonalds/Starbucks all locked down. The most dangerous place I've been in the last several years was an MBTA restroom (I was desperate). So much for "walkable cities" I guess, but good luck finding a proponent who will engage with that aspect.
- paleotrope 3y agoBoston is extremely difficult to find public bathrooms especially around the Common/open drug marketplace.
- ghaff 3y agoYou're not really that far from either Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market or North Station there. Can't speak to how easy it is to find one in any of the local hotels. Of course, in the latter case it helps to look the part and not look too clueless.
- dylan604 3y ago> Of course, in the latter case it helps to look the part and not look too clueless. This is not just applicable to using the restroom as a non-paying customer. You can pretty much go anywhere if you just don't look guilty of doing something your not meant to be doing. They also say carrying a clipboard and looking in a hurry increases your "getting away" with it, whatever "it" may be.
- paleotrope 3y agoThe basement bathroom in Quincy Market is the best option in most of the city.
- rootusrootus 3y agoIt would be really weird for McD's to require a purchase, at least for our use case. We often stop at McD's on a road trip (we have kids), and the first order of business is always the bio break, wash up, and then order food. It would be irritating to have to reverse that process and then leave our food to get cold while we sought relief.
- eyelidlessness 3y agoIt must vary a lot by location even in the US. When I used to bother asking, it was almost universally customer-only in urban and many suburban areas… and almost always got me strange looks for even bothering to ask in more remote areas (where they are often clustered next to a couple gas stations along a freeway exit).
- rascul 3y agoI've never used a McDonald's bathroom where I was required to make a purchase. Sometimes the bathrooms are located around the corner from the counter, near a door, in such a fashion that the employees can't generally tell if someone comes in, uses the bathroom, and leaves. I suspect it varies based on location.
- gabereiser 3y agoThis has been my experience on this planet as well.
- bdw5204 3y agoI've only ever seen a McDonald's bathroom that requires a purchase in NYC around 15 years ago. I doubt that's changed in the years since unless the city made customers only bathrooms illegal.
- lazyasciiart 3y agoAll the ones I know have a coded lock on the door, and one (in a college kid area) requires employees to open the door.
- barsonme 3y agoI think this is a pretty broad generalization. Personally, I’ve never once been refused access to a McDonald’s restroom. I haven’t been to a McDonald’s in a large city (like downtown Seattle), so perhaps it’s different there. But so much of the world exists outside of cities :)
- toast0 3y agoI went to a McDonald's in Seattle's SoDo in 2021 that had a bouncer at the door, and the bathroom had super annoying blue-lighting. It certainly looked like ordering before using the bathroom was the right thing to do. There was a ton of street camping around there.
- rufus_foreman 3y agoThe blue lighting makes it harder to find a vein.
- rayiner 3y agoYikes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thrusong 3y agoThis was a pretty long time ago, like early-Millennium. It was my first job and I was 15. I saw people come in, use the bathroom, and leave, so I asked the executive what I was supposed to do. We were a corporate store and usually a test site for new products and procedures.
- lozenge 3y ago90-95% of McDonalds are franchised, so the lofty ideals of a McDonalds executive are entirely detached from what restaurants actually do. I doubt they are sending secret shoppers just to check the bathroom availability.
- zzzeek 3y agoI use McDonalds bathrooms in a pinch quite often. I don't ask or anything, I walk in, it's there, nobody cares. However, it depends very much on location, and I do this only in suburban areas. if you go into Manhattan, bathrooms that are easy to spot are very much locked down, if there is even one at all, so you have to try to find less obvious bathrooms that don't attract a lot of attention from street traffic.
- wkat4242 3y agoSame in Spain. There's an access code printed on the receipts. At least in the ones in tourist areas. Though you can wait till someone comes out or ask another customer.
- tough 3y agoIn some areas of Spain, restaurants and bars that occupy the public space with terraces are obliged by law to provide bathrooms to anyone asking if I recall correctly A counter-balance act
- kjkjadksj 3y agoThey have that for some restaurants in the US, but you can ask the worker and they will just give you the code.
- bombcar 3y agoIt’s entirely a city/suburb/rural divide. If you’re in an area with homeless restrooms can’t be found. If you’re not, they’re plentiful and free.
- rootusrootus 3y agoI believe this. When I go downtown, the restrictions on facilities go up dramatically. Out in the 'burbs where we live, it's far more relaxed. But we don't have homeless people here (to speak of; we do, but it's on the order of a dozen for a city of 40K).
- kjkjadksj 3y agoEven the ones where they lock the bathroom you don’t need to make a purchase. I just ask the worker to buzz me in and they let me. Its not making or breaking their paycheck to police the bathroom so they generally don’t care if you look like you won’t cause a mess in there.
- a2tech 3y agoI’ve been up and down this country and outside of the pandemic one certainty had been that if I need to piss and I see a McDonald’s I know I’m covered. This changed during the pandemic since many of their lobbies were closed. But in the last year I haven’t seen a McDonald’s that you couldn’t walk into and use the facilities. Now they’re not always the cleanest bathrooms, but they’ve always been there. People talk a lot of shit about McDonald’s but there’s a lot to be said for a rock solid never changing option anywhere in the country.
- riffic 3y agoHotel lobbies also have great facilities
- Gibbon1 3y agoSupermarkets. Big Box stores. Malls always. Bars usually, buy a soda, tip the bartender. One time I availed myself of a 24 hour porn shop at 3am. The bathroom was spotless.
- anotheruser13 3y agoI relied on department stores and Western-style hotels when indisposed in Japan. There weren't many McDonald's around where I was.
- rootusrootus 3y ago> outside of the pandemic This was when our reliance on McD's became much more obvious. During the pandemic they closed outright for a while, and then opened just the drive-thru, and it was months before they were fully open inside with bathrooms again. It made road tripping with the kids a bit more exciting. Fortunately one of my kids can pee on the side of the road easy enough in a pinch.
- rootusrootus 3y agoThis may be regional, or a franchise vs corporate thing, but in the PNW I have never been to a McD's that had a purchase requirement to use the restrooms. But we very rarely go to an urban McD's, so that may be part of it.
- rawgabbit 3y agoA few years ago I visited three different McDonalds in Washington DC. All three were newly renovated in downtown. All three restrooms were unlocked and disgusting. After notifying the staff I figured out some homeless would vent their rage by literally smearing their feces on the walls. When the staff clean it up, they would do it again.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dylan604 3y agoThe McDonalds in downtown Dallas, at least for a time, played classical music outside as well as inside. The theory was that the homeless wouldn't hang around as much. This was back in the 80s when my mom worked downtown, and it was common water cooler conversation. I'm sure as a manager, you're pretty much willing to try anything to avoid the situation you've described. Making it even harder, the location is one block away from the central Greyhound bus station.
- Modified3019 3y agoMy favorite is when places use opera music to drive away loiterers.
- Gunnerhead 3y agoThat’s seriously disgusting. But even without mental illness, you still have people that seem like they don’t know bathroom etiquette. I worked at a retailer during college that had a public bathroom, seemingly normal people still did the most disgusting messes in the toilets that I was left to clean.
- ryandrake 3y agoWhen I was a teenager, I worked as a janitor at McDonalds as my after-school job, and I cleaned the bathrooms. I walked the lobby all the time and could see who was going in and out, and I can assure you (at least back then) there is no correlation between socio-economic class and bathroom etiquette, or mental illness and bathroom etiquette. We had a feces-smearer who was a middle aged lady visiting the restaurant with her normal-looking middle class family. One other fun fact: The men's room was pretty uniformly (but medium) disgusting, but the women's room was where the variance was. I saw foulness in the women's restroom that haunts me to this day.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago> At the end of the day, I would love for our governments to provide taxpayer funded facilities around the city and even on several of our major highways. We used to have a lot here but they closed almost all of them. You are almost there. Now we should ask why this happened: > but they closed almost all of them There is no civic sense in large swathes of the population. Strict enforcement of basic rules will help us a lot here.
- Arainach 3y ago> There is no civic sense in large swathes of the population. Strict enforcement of basic rules will help us a lot here Strict enforcement of basic rules against a subset of the population while letting off other groups is a major contributor to the lack of civic sense.
- rayiner 3y agoI assure you that rich white people defecating in the streets will be treated the same way as poor brown people doing the same thing.
- woodruffw 3y agoThis is baselessly asserted: rich people consistently receive gentler treatment at the hands of the police for similar crimes[1]. Black Americans get dinged for this twice: not only are they poorer on average than Whites, but are also disproportionately likely to be brutalized or killed by law enforcement[2]. When Black people do die in custody, their deaths are more likely to be characterized with pseudomedical terms like “excited delirium[3].” [1]: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/696355 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/696355 [2]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2022/12/22/policing_survey/ https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2022/12/22/policing_survey... [3]: https://www.psychiatry.org/File%20Library/About-APA/Organization-Documents-Policies/Policies/Position-Use-of-Term-Excited-Delirium.pdf https://www.psychiatry.org/File%20Library/About-APA/Organiza...
- 3y ago
- jimt1234 3y agoLove it. Please scale this to other cities and call it "wannapee.com". I'd always assumed an app like this already existed, like Yelp for public restrooms. I never actually looked, though.
- dylan604 3y agoIf it were to be Yelp like, I could only imagine the references to the worst toilet in Scotland.
- supportengineer 3y ago[flagged]
- paint 3y agoChatGPT is such a disease. The person you replied to was making a reference to the movie Trainspotting...
- dylan604 3y agoBut it would be funny to find that review written about the worst toilet in Scotland. Like rick rolling yelpers, and think about it happening to yelpers, I'm here for it
- eropple 3y agoRandomly slathering GPT output in Hacker News comments does not make you cool.
- navhc 3y agoThere is already an app for this, called Where Is Public Toilet that covers most of north America and parts of Europe
- nicbou 3y agoIf you don't already, you should strongly consider improving the data on Open Street Map. Many apps use that data. I frequently use OsmAnd to find public bathrooms.
- lucb1e 3y agoThat sounds like this data should essentially be an overpass-turbo (OpenStreetMap) query away, with an overlay for reviews. Why build a new dataset from the ground up with ©Winnipee at the bottom so nobody can reuse the data when the project is inevitably abandoned (even if that's fifty years down the line)? Edit: example data query http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1A2I http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1A2I
- Symbiote 3y agoHere: https://mapcomplete.org/toilets https://mapcomplete.org/toilets
- pietervdvn 3y agoAnd which I packaged in an easy to use and easy-to-update website: https://mapcomplete.org/toilets https://mapcomplete.org/toilets
- nonethewiser 3y ago> AFAIK, Starbucks had a similar policy for a long time. >It was interesting to see how some locations featured immediately locked down their washrooms. If you can just walk in (no passcode or any) then it is open to me as far as Im concerned. The staff doesnt give a shit. The only point at which theyd care is if you’re exploiting it or causing problems. If you just walk in off the street, do your business, and leave then no one has a problem.
- seb1204 3y agoGreat to see that openstreetmap is being used. The attribution needs to be fixed though. Did you add the toilets to OSM as well?
- habi 3y agoI've sent them a reminder about the missing attribution [1] via the contact form on https://www.winnipee.com/about.php?tab=contact https://www.winnipee.com/about.php?tab=contact [1]: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Reminder_Templates https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Remi...
- thrusong 3y agoThanks for bringing this oversight to my attention and for your patience while it is fixed. I threw a couple of attributes on the site before I left for work an hour ago and will make sure the attribute meets the requirements once I get home this evening.
- habi 3y agoThanks for fixing this so quickly at the moment. And taking the time to fix it for good once your time permits.
- navhc 3y agoHave you considered merging efforts with Where Is Public Toilet? Service has existed for many years and seems to have a decent amount of locations in Winnipeg