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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Everything about the stall door was irrelevant. They are made so cheap and with such gaps because, they are cheaper that way. They won't go down to the floor because, that would be 12" more material cost. They won't ever fit closely because, they sag and bend because they're cheaply installed. All the blather about how they could be different is ignoring the cost factor, which would be large.

ON a different note, I visited a dept store bathroom recently and was surprise to see, it was a hallway of individual bathrooms! Irrelevantly, they were marked Male and Female. If only one person is in it, why does it matter? The one at my house, upstairs first door on the right, is unisex.

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Are you saying the cost of 12" of chipboard is expensive? Because it's not. Especially not at trade prices.

It's not blather, I'm not sure where you buy wood, but if you think the wood of bathroom door even makes up 1% of the cost of building a bathroom... And 0.01% of the cost of losing an employee to something so trivial as a horrid bathroom.

Honestly, this sounds like a US-specific problem, in the UK none of the offices I've worked in have had a 'gap' in the cubicals. Nor the schools or public buildings or public toilets.

Reading these comments are comical at how a whole country can collectively do something so simple so wrong. No judgement, every country has silly quirks like that!

It only matters, what is the marginal cost to the door vendor. Their profit margin is razor thin. They make those doors by the millions and sell them as a commodity. So yes even a few cents is too much.

We proposed putting a fuzzy-logic controller into a Maytag washer. Maytag said, any controls had to come in under 75 cents including sensors and actuators, for them to make it up in pricing. We couldn't manage that back then (the processor chip was several dollars) so no deal. Because washers are a commodity from the manufacturer viewpoint.

This isn't a counter point, all you're doing is proving my point. The consumer is the person who's being an idiot here, not the manufacturer. You can buy bathroom stall doors without a gap.

But who buys a door which doesn't close the gap properly? That costs $1 less? In their multi-million $ buildings?

Only Americans.

>Irrelevantly, they were marked Male and Female.

Anecdotally, my office has about 60 employees and 8 individual bathrooms. They're fully enclosed with sinks and their own heavy closing doors. They also are all equipped with a white noise machine that's connected to the ceiling light switch. I guess we're pretty lucky to have this setup.

About two years ago, however, someone complained that all of the bathrooms were becoming "too dirty" in between weekly cleanings and it was blamed on the men. Therefore, three of the restrooms are now women only, while the remainder are unisex. It seems a bit unfair, but nobody has cared enough to complain.

> Therefore, three of the restrooms are now women only, while the remainder are unisex. It seems a bit unfair, but nobody has cared enough to complain.

Even if today nobody complains, the company might have suffer a lawsuit in the future, by a disgruntled employee.

Better to fix that now, perhaps

I could say something, but my boss (the company owner) isn't the most receptive to suggestions like this.

It took nearly three years of my complaining to finally get an End User License Agreement for our product, for example.

60 employees, weekly cleanings?! Should be every night.

Maybe it is? I really don't know, but I've only ever seen cleaning staff the few times I've come in on weekends, and only ever seen noticeable improvement on Mondays.

>They also are all equipped with a white noise machine that's connected to the ceiling light switch.

That is most likely a ventilation fan. The white noise is a side-effect.

Nope. Actual white noise. The company owns the property and built the building.

I never understood when a place has two single occupancy bathrooms with one marked Men and the other Women. Maybe there's a law that requires this in some places or are they just catering to social expectations?

Womens rooms have sanitary napkin dispensers etc. In the old sexist days only womens rooms had a baby changing table.

There are also social issues, is a one stall / one urinal a single occupancy or not? Technically there's two holes.

Also you'd be surprised architecturally how many are precisely arranged such that a strategically located adjacent closet could be sacrificed to double or triple the bathroom size at a later date, if it because necessary.

(edited to add, if you assume the massively dominant cis, the labeling is to prevent office romance trysts, along the lines of joining the mile high club on a plane but without the plane)

There's still no good reason for the labeling. Take Starbucks for example: two individual gendered bathrooms. When someone is taking a long time in one bathroom, invariably someone of the 'incorrect gender' will use the next available room, because there's a single line of people in a crowded space that all need to go and nobody cares who uses a single person water closet.

And before anyone mentions cleanliness, my anecdotal experience (from experiences like the Starbucks) is that both men and women's toilets are dirty at about the same rate. I would love a janitor to give their observations :)

Ok I volunteered at a parent-cooperative preschool. I cleaned the bathrooms. The girls' bathroom was shockingly worse than the boys'. A data point.

Those dispensers cost ~$10. Cheap to have them in every bathroom. The guys are not going to have a conniption fit if they see them. So there's no longer a good reason to mark individual bathrooms as far as I can see.

I came across a good summary of these requirements a while back. Unfortunately, I can can't find it now, but I can say there are definitely laws regarding this in the US, but they vary by jurisdiction. Some jurisdictions require 2 single-occupancy bathrooms to be labeled gendered, while some other jurisdictions require 2 single-occupancy bathrooms to be unisex.

P.S.: While not what I was looking for, I was able to find this Reason article that talks about the issue: http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/11/gender-neutral-bathroo...

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