The clean toilet is the one nobody uses

The pattern behind all of them is one idea: a toilet is dirty because it is heavily used, so you are hunting for the least-used one nearby. Several kinds of place reliably have quiet toilets. Big anchor and department stores have them at the back or on an upper floor, far from the crowd, and they are cleaner than the mall's central corridor or, worst of all, the food court. Shops that sell hardware and building supplies tend to have pristine, little-used toilets in the middle of the store. Hotel lobbies — the accounts say the larger and smarter the better — have clean guest toilets you can generally walk into without being a guest, and quietly leaving is fine. Coffee chains and fast-food places have a low barrier: you can usually go in, use it, and go, and one account says one well-known chain never turns anyone away. And whatever the building, the accounts say to climb: higher floors and the corners furthest from the entrance, the car park and the café see the least traffic and stay the cleanest. In an airport, the last toilet at the far end of a gate hallway beats the one by the arrivals crowd.

Usually neither, and where you do have to ask, you never have to lie. In many coffee shops, fast-food places and hotel lobbies you can simply walk in and use the toilet without buying anything or asking anyone; the accounts do this routinely. Where a door is staffed or you cannot find it, ask for it as a fact rather than a favour — “where is the bathroom?” gets a pointed finger, while “can I use your bathroom?” invites a no. If you want to add a reason, a plain true one (“I'm not feeling well”) makes people more willing, because a reason lowers their guard. What this page will not hand you is the bag of lies these conversations also trade — claiming you work at the shop next door, pretending to be a customer you are not, faking an emergency or a pregnancy you are not having. You do not need them, they can get you accused of trespassing, and a stranger's refusal is not worth becoming a liar over. Pick the quiet place where no one asks, and keep your honesty.

If you have a medical condition — a bowel or bladder condition, an ostomy, a pregnancy, a treatment that gives you no warning — you are not in the same position as someone who simply did not plan ahead, and there is a real route. In some places, chiefly a number of states in the United States, the law requires a shop to let a person with a qualifying medical condition use its employee toilet even if there is no public one, though it may ask for proof of the condition; these are often called restroom-access laws. This is not a universal right — many places and most countries have no such law — so check what applies where you are rather than assuming it. Practically, one account says a calm, honest statement of a real medical need works even without a law, because the person in front of you does not want to be responsible for what happens if they refuse. And a family or accessible toilet, where one exists, gives you a private, single room without any of this. The point is that a real need is yours to state plainly — it is the invented emergency, not the real one, that this page leaves out.

Partly, and the accounts argue about how far to trust it, so here are both sides. The idea is that in a place whose users are mostly one gender — a nursing school, an engineering building, a shop with a mostly-female clientele — the toilet for the other gender sees very little use and is therefore spotless and private. Several accounts swear by it on campuses and in certain shops, and as a general rule it follows the same logic as everything else here: less traffic, cleaner room. But other accounts, in equal number, say do not rely on it: the balance shifts as students move through a course, some of those buildings never had a minority-gender toilet or put it in a basement, and when one gender heavily outnumbers the other they sometimes just use the other room anyway. So treat it as a bonus where you happen to be, not a plan you travel for. If you are not a student, it rarely applies at all, and the ordinary advice — go up, go back, go quiet — serves you better.