24 hour gas station near me with bathroom

#24 hour gas station near me with bathroom drivers#

Texaco created a “Registered Rest Room” program in 1938 for its thousands of stations in all 48 states. Stations began equipping facilities with running hot and cold water, mirrors, soap, toilet paper, powder rooms, makeup tables and couches.Ĭompanies created a flurry of campaigns in national and women’s magazines, on billboards, and through signs posted outside gas stations in the 1930s and 1940s to illuminate their clean bathrooms.

Neil Baylis/Alamy Stock PhotoĬompanies believed that if a woman had a good experience at one of their restrooms, she would tell her friends that the bathrooms were safe for them and their children to use.īy the late 1920s, gas stations made changes to their bathrooms to cater to women, Spellman said. Many of these stations, however, were in shabby condition and their designs and services were an afterthought.Īn advertisement for Texaco stations in 1954, part of the company's 'Registered Rest Room' program.

#24 hour gas station near me with bathroom drivers#

The development of the interstate highway system and the rise of self-service marked the end of clean gas station bathrooms’ heyday.Īt the turn of the 20th century, automobile drivers would pull into a blacksmith shop, a hardware store or a pharmacy to purchase a tin can of gasoline.īut the mass adoption of cars, development of roads and the introduction of the hand-operated gas pump around 1910 led to a proliferation of curbside gas stations.īy 1920, there were 15,000 filling stations in the United States. “She will remember the dirty rest room and avoid the station on her next trip,” read a 1938 article in trade journal National Petroleum News with the headline “Women Shun Dirty Stations.”Īt the same time, companies’ efforts excluded Black women and men, who were barred from using these restrooms in the segregated South and were not a focus for these companies in the North until the 1950s and 1960s. Oil companies believed women would be the ones deciding where to stop with their families, even if they weren’t driving, said Susan Spellman, a historian at Miami University who wrote her thesis on how women influenced the development of gas stations. Gas stations upgraded their bathrooms to appeal to women. Trailers stopping into a gas station in New Jersey in the early to mid-20th century. By 1928, women bought half of gas stations’ fuel that year, according to an industry journal. The companies battled to surpass each others’ bathrooms, with some companies even sending out “White Patrol” and “Highway Hostess” teams to inspect and certify them.Ĭompanies tried to make their bathrooms feel more like home in response to the growing number of women who were driving and traveling around the country.

Texaco, Gulf, Shell, Sunoco, Esso, Phillips and other companies plastered billboards on roads, ran color ads in national magazines and created catchy slogans such as “Registered Rest Rooms” and “Clean Restroom Crusade” to highlight their facilities.

In fact, oil giants’ gas station ads in the early and mid-20th century assured travelers that their bathrooms were as clean as those in drivers’ own homes. Spotless bathrooms were once a crucial selling point for gas stations.

Gas station bathrooms are the last place most people want to stop to do their business.īut that wasn’t always the case.