You might date yourself if you remember pay toilets.
Although most people alive today don’t remember coin-slotted lavatories, they were once quite common.
The first pay toilet in the United States was installed in 1910 in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The original thought was that making people pay for the “service” would encourage them to keep the toilet clean.
But the opposite happened.
People were so angry at having to pay to carry out basic biological functions that vandalism increased, costing more to fix than could ever be collected in dimes.
Furthermore, women’s groups declared pay toilets discriminatory because women had to pay to urinate, whereas men had the luxury of free urinals.
Many courts backed this argument, and by the late 1960s, most coin slots had been removed.
Today pay toilets are very rare indeed.
