The TP Escalation

With recent panic-buying, hoarding, and consumer-inflicted shortages of various products, toilet paper and possible shortages of it have been in the news of late. This blog post isn’t about any of that. I just want to complain to the toilet paper industry about something that’s been happening to toilet paper in recent years. This seems like a good time to do that, while TP is in the news.

The rolls are getting smaller. For years, the diameter of a roll has been shrinking while the diameter of the tube the paper is wound on has been getting larger. This has led the toilet paper industry to invent a new kind of toilet paper product. I call it the virtual roll.

Consider, for example, this package of toilet paper I purchased. It’s small enough to fit comfortably under my arm, and yet the toilet paper industry would have us believe I just bought 72 rolls of paper. The package contains 18 rolls of paper but the toilet paper people want us to believe each roll of paper is really 4 rolls.

Dream on, toilet paper people. We buy your product because it fills a need, not because of your ridiculously inflated numbers on the package. You can say 72 rolls all day long, but we all know the package holds 18 rolls of paper. Why not leave it at that and quit pretending your customers can’t count past 18, and we’ll pretend you have at least a modicum of respect for your customers’ intelligence.