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
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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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.)
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.
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 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.
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'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.
Am I too non-USA to understand this?
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.
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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.
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.
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Really? That's what I'd expect even in a run-down public toilet in a train station over here in Austria.
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.
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.
maybe you can't make the doors fit the stalls properly because you don't use the metric system.
No man, you don't get it, I was told that a foot is much better, because that's 12 inches and then 12 can be easily divided by 2,3,4,6
As if you couldn't just work with wood sizes of 12 or 24cms....
i would accept that if the rest followed.
it's 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 1760 yards in a mile.
meanwhile everywhere else in the world we just add and remove zeroes as needed. (or move the decimal point)
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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.
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.
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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.
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"
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.
My middle school didn’t even have doors on the stalls. That was f’d up.
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?
So you don't suffocate in there.
As someone from Europe I can guarantee you that 5-10cm (2-4") at the bottom and 30cm (12") at the top with almost no gap between the door and wall are by far enough to not suffocate. Maybe put a vent in the ceiling for good measure.
A combination of saving money and keeping people out of the bathroom.
The reality is that every American has experienced this for their entire lives at this point. The actual popular opinion is "I don't actually care because every public bathroom I have been in since the 40s is like this."
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