[burlesona]

So the Author is based in Spain and writing about life in Spain. My experiences traveling in Europe have been that bathrooms are often hard to find there … but, as a tourist, I’ve definitely not seen enough of normal daily life to know.

Meanwhile many comments here seem to be reflexively decrying the situation in the US. That makes no sense to me. Every business has to have a bathroom, and in the overwhelming majority of the country these bathrooms are not locked and nobody minds if you come inside and use one.

There are two exceptions, that most of us aren’t visiting very often:

(1) some of our city centers where there are concentrated disorder and mental health problems

(2) the most crowded tourist destinations

These places tend to keep bathrooms locked, but you can usually just ask and get the key or code. Many have signs saying you need to make a purchase but few try to enforce that.

These exceptions are indeed annoying, but I believe the solution is better mental health care and generally more effective community policing so that businesses in those locations could follow the norms of the rest of the country.