When Americans Had to Pay to Poop

Unlike the useless plethora of days devised to sell bacon or donuts or blue jeans, World Toilet Day, though it might sound like a load of crap, raises attention for one of the world’s biggest problems: Poor sanitation and a lack of clean toilets.

For the first time ever, the United Nations has recognized World Toilet Day as a chance to raise awareness about the 2.5 billion people—that’s roughly one-in-three—who don’t have consistent access to a clean toilet. That leads to a huge number of sanitation diseases and deaths, and it’s a huge reason why groups like the World Toilet Organization is trying to install new toilets in underserved parts of the world such as Cambodia, South Africa, and India.

Other groups, like Toilet Hackers, are trying to find new ways of designing sanitation systems that use little or no water. The connection between disease and poor sanitation is a no brainer, but Quartz has an interesting piece about how much simply waiting in line for or seeking out a clean toilet costs the world economy—roughly $10.7 billion a year in India alone.

Though it might not feel like it sometimes walking around downtown Manhattan, Americans have it exceedingly easy when it comes to finding a clean toilet to do our business. But it wasn’t always this way. Like much of the world, pay toilets were once common in the United States. By the mid 1970s, the industry was worth more than $2 million per year, or roughly $8.7 million adjusting for inflation. The vast majority of pay toilet locks were manufactured by one company, Nik-O-Lok, which charged 10 cents per use. That company is still (barely) around today, and still sells both coin and token-operated toilet locks.

It wasn’t until several groups, most notably, a grassroots organizations known as the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, put pressure on state and local governments to ban the use of pay toilets.

That pressure was first successful in Chicago. In an op-ed published in the Chicago Tribune in 1972, CEPTIA claimed that rental toilets at O’Hare Airport and pay toilets in general “are a disgrace and possibly a violation of our civil rights. In essence, they make the satisfaction of our basic biological need contingent on the availability of small change, thus exploiting human discomfort for commercial toilets.”

CEPTIA also touched on the issue of gender equality. In that same op-ed, CEPTIA argued that, because no one charged for pay urinals, women were being unfairly discriminated against. Their offensive worked. By 1975, three states—New York, Wyoming, and Alaska—had banned pay toilets. Chicago had also outlawed them by that time. By the end of the decade, pay toilets became increasingly rare.

That is, except in New York City. In 1993, the state gave the city an exception to the statewide ban; in 2008, the city introduced its first permanent pay toilet, with plans to open at least 20 more. That plan has stalled, and few exist around the city.

Today, in the United States, the argument has become more about whether businesses can prevent people from using their bathrooms. The fight has been taken up by the American Restroom Association, a group that advocates for “the availability of clean, safe, well designed public restrooms.” That organization mainly works for people who have incontinence or irritable bowel issues and pushes people who have been denied restroom use to contact local media and their politicians to push for new regulation requiring accessible bathrooms.

Even when pay toilets reigned supreme, the sanitation situation was hardly comparable to how it is in many countries around the world. But when you walk into a clean, free public restroom, just remember that it hasn’t always been this way—and that making toilets available to all needs to be higher up on our priority list.