I bet they make the bulk pack you bought out of two already-wrapped 3-packs plus the inner loose rolls. And all the rolls are first wrapped as singles.
It’s all about being able to do larger production runs with less variation. I’d also not be surprised to find the bulk pack you bought isn’t available everywhere, but may be an overpack for whichever place you bought the stuff from.
The crew probably ran it through the wrappers twice. This lot should have been found by quality control but made it through. Scott Paper product or Georgia Pacific? Those are the 2 biggest companies in the US.
My wife ran wrappers for 20 years at GP. Quality Control would find and reject product for various reasons. Usually the perforations where you tear it off weren’t good. Rejected product would be sent right back to be re-pulped or sometimes given away to employees as a sort of bonus for meeting safety goals or some other target. Always bringing home “product”. Then I realized how much money I was saving by never buying either toilet paper or towels for 20 years.
I have been trying, but I am not able to shit fast enough to even get to the back of my closet. And if I do, there is a whole spare room upstairs. If I live another 100 years I will not run out of toilet paper or towels. Oh, I forgot about my garage/car shop/man cave. It is full too.
I thought of this thread today on a different packaging issue. Bottle of veg oil with an unbeknownst flip up top that lets you squirt it out. If you unscrew it the “seal” like on liquor bottles breaks and it won’t screw back on because it wasn’t screwed on in the first place. You now have a lid that SETs on top of the bottle.
I hate pump top lotion and soap dispenser bottles. I can never figure out how to make them work. I’ve accidentally made them work. It seems there’s not a magic key to this operation. Hit or miss.
I bought a grab bag of corks for these issues. Sometimes I find one that works.
What saved the day was a recycle bin dressing bottle with a lid that fit. But in all that commotion I lost the lid to my crushed red pepper. I first thought… did I use the pepper lid for the veg oil? NOPE!
My brother and I inherited a closet full of paper products from our mom. She died in 2010, and I started having to buy it again in 2021 (after sharing some of my largesse with friends during the pandemic shortages).
Weird packaging or not, I’m not buying this paper towel again.
It’s scratchy and don’t wipe nothing up right.
I saved about $5.
I’d give $5 for a roll of Bounty right now.
I’m not a giant “big brand” person. Middle of the road is good enough for my needs.
But this towel is just crap.
And NO company needs that much plastic to be tossed after they’ve killed hundreds of trees to make their product.
Bounty is pretty much the only paper towel I ever buy. It’s not expensive if you buy large packages when they’re on sale. It’s not worth the small savings for an inferior product. I always get the “select-a-size” to minimize waste, which lets you tear off half sheets and is usually all I ever need.
As for the over-packaged towels with multiple layers of wrapping, there’s absolutely no excuse for that in today’s environmentally conscious age. I wouldn’t buy it again even if it was an excellent product.
The toilet paper I buy consists of 6 individual unwrapped rolls inside a printed plastic wrapper. These six-packs are sold that way in many stores. There is a UPC code on that package. The ones I buy at CostCo are 5 of those 6-packs packaged inside a larger plastic wrapper – that package has a different UPC code on the outside wrapper. I believe the same product is also packaged & sold as a dozen rolls, which is 2 of the 6-packs wrapped together.
So it looks like the factory produces single rolls, and puts 6 of them into a plastic wrapper. That’s the basic size. Then they produce larger packs by combining multiple of those into larger packages, enough variations to cover the whole range of sizes/prices that consumers want.
That seems to be the most efficient way to do that, and it involves double wrapping their base 6-packs into larger packages with a 2nd plastic wrapper.
BTDT. Both chapters. Really lit my fire when I did that.
Good you had a solution to hand, even if somehow your crushed red pepper was a casualty.
Was that the result of some kind of hoarder nuttiness on Mom’s part? Both my parents ended up not hoarding junk, but rather overbuying way too much stuff for an older single person during the novelty heyday of Costco and Sam’s Club.
We found four sealed 1/2 gallon jars of French’s ordinary yellow mustard in Dad’s pantry. Plus one open (and long-expired) with maybe a cup’s-worth used out of it. Not a crazy backstock for a busy sandwich or burger restaurant, but a bit much for one old man.
Mom had enough canned goods to eat for a decade. And she rarely actually ate canned goods; most of what she cooked was fresh. We threw out the expired stuff dating back a decade or more and still donated >400 lbs (!) to a homeless shelter / food pantry.
For the win! Those are great.
You (any you) would not think that paper towels are high tech enough that they could be subject to enshitification. As beck has just demonstrated, you (any you) would be wrong in that thought.
Cheap paper towels aren’t worth the crap paper they’re made from. I’m generally the very opposite of a brand name snob, but there are a couple of exceptions, and Bounty squares are one of those.
Minor nit / monster pedant mode: In their parlance “Select-a-size” is their full-width half-length sheets. “Tear-a-square” has those half-length sheets also subdivided width-wise to get a neat roughly square quarter sheet.
One hundred percent old lady with access to a Sam’s Club (my fault: I put her on my account as a secondary user). It was kind of her recreation, going to the big box store, and when she forgot her list, she’d often buy staple items that wouldn’t go bad “just in case.” We donated the canned goods that completely filled two cupboards.
Oddly enough, she was far from being a hoarder in most areas, and everything was stored very neatly. In fact, her entire house was so clean and well-ordered that my brother and I were able to clear it ourselves in one week.
Your Mom & mine were evidently cut from mostly the same cloth. Sam’s Club as recreation is about right.
Everything was quite neat and clean and organized. Except for the burgeoning supply of wretchedly excess whatever that had outgrown first the built-in pantries and then the free-standing cabinets she’d bought and then began tiling her spare bedroom floor.
My brother worked as a long-haul truck driver for a while. One time he was hauling tp from the manufacturer to a grocery chain warehouse/distribution center in New Hampshire.The warehouse crew at the delivery site managed to clumsily slice through the plastic wrapper on a pallet of TP so deeply that they also sliced into an entire line of six deep stacked up packages that held 64 rolls each. Only the one ‘column’ of the tp rolls was opened to the outside, but, nope, ruined, got to throw it out, you can take it away.
So on the way back to the manufacturer for the next load my brother was able to take a slight detour to pass by my parents house, and gave them 384 rolls of tp! Okay, the rolls that were directly under the knife had a few layers deep sliced through, but once you peeled off those layers all the rest of those rolls were fine to use, and the other 60 rolls in each of the packaged were completely perfect.
At the time, the household consisted of two adults full time, plus two at college daughters who were only home about two months each year until graduation and then not at all. It took FOREVER to use up all that tp. We used to joke we had the only house in town that had an attic insulated with tp.