McDonalds 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?

I 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.

Same 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.

Boston is extremely difficult to find public bathrooms especially around the Common/open drug marketplace.

You'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.

> 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.

The basement bathroom in Quincy Market is the best option in most of the city.

It 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.

It 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).

Yeah 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.

I'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.

This has been my experience on this planet as well.

I'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.

All the ones I know have a coded lock on the door, and one (in a college kid area) requires employees to open the door.

I 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 :)

I 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.

The blue lighting makes it harder to find a vein.

Yikes.

This 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.

>This was a pretty long time ago, like early-Millennium.

LOL, yep, I'm officially old!

Sorry, but as I approach 40, 20-23 years ago does seem like a long time. It went by in the blink of an eye, though.

It only gets faster

90-95% 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.

I 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.

Same 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.

In 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

They have that for some restaurants in the US, but you can ask the worker and they will just give you the code.

It’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.

I 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).

Even 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.

I’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.

Hotel lobbies also have great facilities

Supermarkets. 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.

I relied on department stores and Western-style hotels when indisposed in Japan. There weren't many McDonald's around where I was.

> 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.

This 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.

A 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.

The 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 was one block away from the central Greyhound bus station.

My favorite is when places use opera music to drive away loiterers.

That’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.

When 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.

Agreed regarding the variance of the women’s bathroom, I shocked it up to a larger number of women vs men customers in that particular retailer.

> 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.

When you say "I figured", do you mean it is a complete fabrication, something that exists only in your mind? What should we take from that?

I've lived and spent my time in major cities most of my life. I've used many public urban bathrooms. Like many things in cities, they are used much more heavily and often are less clean. Some have been disgusting in places, but I've never seen what you imagine.

> some homeless

What does that mean? Are you saying you think all homeless people are essentially people who might do what is in your head? I interact with lots of people who appear to lack homes (I wouldn't know without asking), daily or a bit less. They are just people, just like you are people; they might express similar extreme stereotypes or imagine crazy things about some group; they might be just about anything or anyone.

If you really imagine these things, try talking to people. Just like every other stereotyped group, you'll find out they are just human beings (which are social animals).

EDIT: edited quite a bit

I did not make the story up. I talked to the workers at all three restaurants. They hemmed and hawed because there were families eating in the facility and didn't want to gross people out.

You wrote "I figured", not that anyone said so.

> I've lived and spent my time in major cities most of my life. I've used many public urban bathrooms. Like many things in cities, they are used much more heavily and often are less clean. Some have been disgusting in places, but I've never seen what you imagine.

I'm not op. I've been in public restrooms smeared with faeces.

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

> “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

It's not philosophy - I did no philosophizing. I am describing many years of experience.

> It's not philosophy - I did no philosophizing. I am describing many years of experience.

You should look up the meaning of that quote.

This is one of the most out of touch aggressive replies I've ever seen

As someone who worked in food service in a major city, we 100% had a homeless person who came in and destroyed the bathroom multiple times. Everyone who worked there knew him and felt bad for the guy, but we had to ask him to leave when we saw him come in because he would do things like what the other commenter described.

> This is one of the most out of touch aggressive replies I've ever seen

Do you see the irony?

> Some have been disgusting in places, but I've never seen what you imagine.

Because someone cleaned it up before you saw it? I worked at Seattle’s 3rd and Pine McDonald’s back in the mid 90s (if you live in Seattle, you know the place). We had lots of unhoused neighbors coming in doing really horrible things to our bathrooms. When someone reportedly all we could do was put our bathroom out of order until someone (like me) could clean it up.

Unmonitored public bathrooms simply don’t exist in downtown Seattle because they can’t be maintained without someone to constantly clean them and lock them up if things get too bad.

Lots of other crazy things happened at that place. Seriously, anyone who doesn’t understand homelessness should try working at a fast food restaurant in the downtown of a big city. But it never got boring there, and the coworkers (mostly Filipino) were all cool to work with.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

> anyone who doesn’t understand homelessness

Perhaps we just have different experiences, and we both 'don't understand' some things?

It’s easy to say that those things never happen from the suburbs or uptowns where they never happen. But downtown or in grungier parts of the city, you just know they happen and are actually common.

Again, maybe we can do better than attribute a difference of opinion or experience to the other person being ignorant. As I've said three times now, I'm not writing from the suburbs or 'uptown' (not what you think it is in many cities!); I've been in the areas you name daily for many years. (Have you?)

IME it's the reverse: if you aren't from those areas, it's easier to believe the negative hype. The people most terrified of cities don't live in them - the less contact they have, the more they believe these things. A very recent survey showed how Republicans, who are rare among urban residents, have by far the most concerns about cities. It was the NYC suburbs that voted Republican because of concern about crime - in the city where they don't live (and where people voted Democratic). It's easier to believe these crazy stories if you aren't there, about the 'other'.

Now I'm in cities that are, in places absurdly safe. Downtowns filled with people who are going about their days, not a care in the world. Yet I hear suburbanties say they are afraid to come downtown. It's laughable. And then I turn on cable TV or HN and read how dangerous it is, how crazy homeless people are - places I am and people I talk to daily.

It's like standing in the sunshine and hearing people insist that it's raining here. It's that absurd. I don't doubt others have different personal experiences, and I'm glad to read about them - the speculative, uninformed BS, not so much.

You very clearly have never worked at a fast food restaurant.

They have the right to refuse entry to homeless people. They should exercise it.

How are you going to say it's because they are homeless and not whatever minority.

Wouldn't the burden of proof lie with whomever is making the claim of bias? And it would be easily countered with surveillance footage showing just one white male homeless guy getting turned away.

Let's make life more difficult for the people already with the hardest life. Nice mentality.

Invite them into your home then. Let them smear shit all over your walls.

> 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.

> 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.

I assure you that rich white people defecating in the streets will be treated the same way as poor brown people doing the same thing.

This 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

[2]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2022/12/22/policing_survey...

[3]: https://www.psychiatry.org/File%20Library/About-APA/Organiza...

Per interaction they are more likely to experience violence per police office but per interaction black Americans are all about equally likely to die to law enforcement as the average.

"disproportionately likely to be brutalized or killed by law enforcement"

Hi woodruffw - what group is disproportionaly likely to kill or brutalize law enforcement? What happens when you correct for that?

ah yes the just and even handed laws that prevent both the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges.

Yes, but those low level crimes are much more disruptive to having a safe and orderly society that’s nice to live in.

yes. We truly must crack down on these crimes that so disrupt a safe and orderly society. That said, maybe we're being slightly hasty with bringing in the criminal justice system to deal with this injustice. I think we as a society underestimate the importance of our social safety nets in the crimes of the homeless.

When you stop and think about the bigger picture, clearly it's the food banks that are responsible. By letting the homeless scum of the earth get food twice a week, we give them the feces that will just be maliciously defecated upon streets and in our businesses. Clearly we should be closing them down to preserve a nice to live in society.

> When you stop and think about the bigger picture, clearly it's the food banks that are responsible. By letting the homeless scum of the earth get food twice a week, we give them the feces that will just be maliciously defecated upon streets and in our businesses. Clearly we should be closing them down to preserve a nice to live in society.

So are you opening up your home for a total stranger to relief themselves? Why not? You seem much kinder than us folks. If enough people living in cities with this issue open up their homes to strangers in need, we won't have this issue in the first place.

I will be waiting for the eventual proof that you do so.

Hyperbole requires hyperbole ;)

$500 says you live in a suburb as soon as you have a child. People like you who think it's alright for there to be massive disorder in cities because you have a nice exit plan are truly the most vile of society.

I disagree. Rich white people have "a long life ahead of them" which it would be a shame to ruin for "20 minutes of action", so they would be let off without charges or without jail time, while the poor would be sentenced to the maximum penalty allowed by the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_v._Turner

Yeah rich white people never get 39 years in prison for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Weinstein

They get that rarely enough that it's newsworthy when they do.

So was Brock Turner.

Source needed.

By basic civic laws, I mean things like not allowing open air drug markets in downtown:

Very recent video

https://v.redd.it/x87v0nws5anb1

FFS, if you have an open air drug market, it doesn't really matter if there are public restrooms. This is one major reason why BART boarded up their restrooms in downtown SF.

"This is one major reason why BART boarded up their restrooms in downtown SF."

We live in a society where we can't have public restrooms and progressives (including virtually half the commenters here!) think that we're being too mean to vagrants. Just incredible.

Why are Tokyo and Singapore nice cities? What would they do if someone was shooting up in the streets in front of children?

America’s dysfunctional urban areas are a manifestation of American culture. And no—it’s not about the level of social services. Many countries with less wealth and fewer social services have nice, orderly urban areas. It’s that urban living requires enforcement of order and norms among the population that Americans are unwilling to do.

One of the main issues is our system of government. It is set up in a way that even one veto-point allows it to default to lawlessness. In many urban areas you have that veto point in the form of a progressive Board of Supervisors/local government, progressive District Attorney or very commonly, progressive judges. Just one progressive in the chain of command and it results in everything being progressive and no consequences for disorder.

Remind me again - when is the last time progressives shut down the federal government? Conservatives threaten to do so every year and have succeeded many times in the last 15 years.

The federal government has very little to do with the quality of the day to day life of middle class people. Police, education, etc., are all state and local issues. If you get beat up by criminals in front of your kids, that’s the fault of the local government to enforce basic order in society: https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/shivanthi-sathanandan-...

Your reply is a complete and utter non-sequitur. Conservatives are not why homeless drug addicts are given free reign to camp out and harass every day, hard working tax payers in San Francisco. That's entirely due to a single veto point (a progressive judge who doesn't even live in the city), despite there finally being some local government push against such activities.

So strange. Are you in the US? Probably not.

Then you would know the federal government has zero to do with things like public restrooms. It is like local govts which are almost all progressive in high density cities where restrooms are an issue.

In Japan that's not a problem. It begs the question what they do differently.

There is no way to get half of America to wear a 1-ply cotton cloth for their countrymen during a pandemic, and much of the other half is too fucking stupid to pull that cloth up over their noses even after two years of practice. I think the idea of pleasant bathrooms is a lost cause.

I don’t think the data supports this assertion. I think the perception that this is true is likely due to news click bait designed to generate revenue based on fostering outrage. Here is an excerpt from USC public health article.

Overall, since late March 2020, between 80% and 90% of U.S. adults consis­tently have viewed wearing a mask or face covering as an effective way to stay safe from the coronavirus, according to the Understanding Coronavirus in America Tracking Survey, an ongoing nationally representative internet-based panel survey of more than 6,000 people aged 18 and older (see Data Source).

Similarly, about 90% reported wearing a mask in the previous seven days to keep safe from the virus, although there are significant differences by locale, age, gender, race, income, educa­tion, and other sociodemographic factors. Generally, people who live in rural areas, are younger, are male, are white, have lower incomes, and have less education are less likely to report wearing masks, the survey found (Figure 1).

Source article: https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/evidence-base/most-u-s-adults-w...

Thank you, that is better than what my perception was.

10-20% is still 30-60 million which is a lot of people. One can see how you'd get that impression.

You apply the phrase "too fucking stupid" to others yet fail to mention that mask mandates are not effective:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/opinion/do-mask-mandates-...

Those "1-ply cotton cloths" do little more than prevent police from IDing ANTIFA protesters burning, robbing and generally raise hell in, e.g., Portland, Oregon.

Clean restrooms are something we can do - it only requires will, acceptance, skill and persistence: the will to maintain certain hygeine standards, the acceptance that some tasks are unpleasant yet worthwhile, the cleaning skill (most young'uns don't know how to properly sweep a floor, much less swing a mop) and the persistence to, well, persist!

You are in a cult, but I am glad you are trying to maintain normal hygienic standards.

"cult"? Hmmm, can't follow you there. But thanks for the pat on the back and FWIW feel free to shit anywhere you want!8-)) [in CA that is]

This is incredible. You really think that American public bathrooms can't be nice because of redneck MAGA Republicans? Let me guess, you also think that red states are more dangerous because there is an epidemic of rednecks in trailer trucks driving around randomly killing folks, right?

The reason we can't have nice public bathrooms in the U.S. is because progressive politicians have decided that drug addict vagrants are the one group in society that cannot be allowed to face any repercussions for their actions.

Public bathrooms in conservative suburbs in America are actually fairly nice (as are they in liberal suburbs!). The difference is that the floor price point of living in a suburb keeps out drug addicts and vagrants who would destroy the place instantly.

> There is no civic sense in large swathes of the population. Strict enforcement of basic rules will help us a lot here.

It won't solve the problem, and that is a ton of mentally ill people with barely to no access to adequate treatment. Locking them up in jails may help for a few days or weeks but is horribly expensive to taxpayers while still not solving the problem (or make it even worse, given how conditions behind bars tend to be).

Love 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.

If it were to be Yelp like, I could only imagine the references to the worst toilet in Scotland.

Ah, laddie, ye won’t believe the gem I found in the heart of Scotland! This public restroom, I tell ya, it’s a wee slice of heaven for the weary traveler.

First off, it’s cleaner than me own shack on a good day. No grime, no filth – it’s like they’ve hired elves to scrub the floors. And the smell, well, it’s fresher than the Scottish Highlands after a spring rain.

The facilities themselves? Aye, they’ve got stalls with doors that lock properly, and plenty of toilet paper to spare. The sink’s got hot water that flows like a mountain stream, and the soap is as fragrant as a bloomin’ meadow.

But here’s the real kicker, they’ve got artwork on the walls! You can stand there and admire the local talent while you do your business.

So, if ye ever find yerself in Scotland, make a beeline for this restroom, and you’ll be singin’ its praises like a bagpiper at a ceilidh. Aye, it’s a public convenience that’s pure gold!

ChatGPT is such a disease. The person you replied to was making a reference to the movie Trainspotting...

But 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

Randomly slathering GPT output in Hacker News comments does not make you cool.

There is already an app for this, called Where Is Public Toilet that covers most of north America and parts of Europe

If 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.

That 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

[delayed]

And which I packaged in an easy to use and easy-to-update website: https://mapcomplete.org/toilets

> 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.

Great to see that openstreetmap is being used. The attribution needs to be fixed though. Did you add the toilets to OSM as well?

I've sent them a reminder about the missing attribution [1] via the contact form on https://www.winnipee.com/about.php?tab=contact

[1]: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Remi...

Thanks 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.

Thanks for fixing this so quickly at the moment. And taking the time to fix it for good once your time permits.

Have 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