Pay to Play...er Pee

You won't find a public toilet here that doesn't require paying a fee. It's usually 5-10 SEK. The conversion rate, which you can't help doing in your head no matter how painful, is about 7.5 Krona to one US dollar. It's fluctuating, it got as high as 7.9 last week. With the dollar tanking this week, it was down to 7.4 yesterday. The Euro trades at about ten to one and that's about where things should be to be just ridiculously expensive. Converting to dollars, makes it comically expensive.

Doing the simple math, you can see, that's nearly a dollar to over a dollar to go to the loo. I have been told that they charge to maintain the bathrooms. Strange that they can't maintain the bathrooms on the sizable amount of tax revenue they collect. Even stranger that no one else finds this pretty unacceptable.

Places like McDonald's and it's Swedish equivalent Max Burger charge also. Leading me to believe it's also about keeping the inordinate amount of crazies, drunks and drug users out of the bathroom. So again, it becomes a case of the majority having to pay for the irresponsible behavior of the minority.