I recall seeing an ad, during the peak of COVID, from some enterprising asshole in someplace like eBay offering toilet paper for some incredibly exorbitant price. So it’s not just hoarders that cause shortages, it’s also speculative profiteers, some of whom might have been buying up even more than run-of-the-mill hoarders.
I was fortunate that during the COVID crisis I never ran out of TP, not because I was hoarding, but because I couldn’t resist the opportunity to buy my favourite brand whenever it was on sale, which was often enough that I eventually had all the cabinets in the spare bathroom stuffed with it. When COVID hit, I had a sort of mini-warehouse of TP.
Agreed that usage patterns changed during COVID. I ended up w a small case of institutional restroom fanfold hand towels to use as replacement home-style rolled paper towels.
But I bought them reactively, not proactively, once conventional home rolled paper towels became unavailable.
And any Hormuz-related actual production shortages should be across the board. No reason for usage pattern deltas until unless the whole situation gets Great Depression levels of dire. Which I greatly doubt will occur.
If I lived rural with unlimited square feet I’d do as you do. Doubly so if I had a family & critters as you do.
As a sorta representative example of the 30+ percent of people who live real small / urban, we have different needs and different constraints. And may be collectively a lot less resilient than you & your co-cohort are.
As noted in another thread, I debate buying bars of soap in the convenient 3-pack or the too hard to store 8-pack. OTOH it takes 30 seconds to get to the groc store out my front door. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs; it’s all tradeoffs.
My glass cake plate lives there. So does my lemon juicer, and my microwave plate covers. Also the little wicker basket i use to serve muffins and biscuits.
Which is to say, oddly, even though it’s hard to reach that space, i actually use it a lot. I just fished out a microwave plate cover 10 minutes ago.
We are in the midst of our kitchen renovation and cabinets have been installed. They go to ceiling but pretty much anything above the second shelf is dead to me. We’ll have to get some ladder that looks nice on wall hook maybe. Otherwise I’ll be that old man who died falling while climbing on the counter to reach the third shelf …
Our ceilings aren’t that high. We have a step stool, that i need to reach the top shelf of the pantry, where we keep Tupperware (on one side) and overflow spices (on the other.) and to reach the cake pans and the candles and the travel mugs but i can reach must of the stuff over the stove. I need the step stool for the glass cake plate, but i can reach most of the rest of it.
I, too, find the cabinet above the fridge useful only for things that I very rarely use, and I’m fairly tall. It was always hard to reach, but the new fridge is either deeper or slightly higher than the old one, which makes it even harder.
Among the things up there were three glass baking dishes, and I eventually took the one I tend to use most frequently out of there and made room for it in a lower shelf beside the stove. Most of the other stuff up there I haven’t used in years. The reachability of the infamous cabinet above the fridge depends on a combination of your height and the size of the fridge. I’m of above average height and still have trouble with it.
Setting aside storage space and just considering consumption rate. …
I have always considered myself kinda high-consumption on TP. One “mega” roll lasts me living alone about a week, but feels like it oughta last about 2. It is only used for the “official” purpose, nothing else. No counter wiping, no toilet exterior cleaning, nothing except wiping waste products off the body.
When GF stays over, I swear one mega roll lasts the two of us about a day and a half. I cannot fathom what she may be doing with all that. I’m about to ask for details and some show-and-tell, but haven’t quite worked up the gumption.
Anyhow, I could see how a family of 6 people all like GF could get through 120 rolls of TP in a month. At which point it’s not a crazy amount of backstock. For them. For me (and probably you) alone, that’s 2+ years of TP.
And if they specialize in buying the really cheap stuff at the big box store they may well be unwittingly buying rather small rolls. It looks huge, but the reason it’s so cheap is they’re ripping customers off. So they have 120 mini rolls; they just don’t know that.
I had a friend years ago getting ready for her first baby.
She had several sisters so really didn’t need clothing or blankets. Decor was handled by her MIL.
She was not happy about that. So for her family and friends baby shower she requested a particular brand of diapers that came in a heavy box. (Talk about wasteful packaging)
I believe it was Huggies brand.
Any way 9 outta 10 brought a box of diapers to the party.
When she took them home she made a sofa out of them in the nursery. And kept it. Even after she opened and removed the diapers the boxes could actually be sat on.
Towards the end of the pregnancy with their first child, who is now 26, every time my brother or his wife went to the grocery store, they would pick up a pack of diapers. They probably had 10 or 12 packs of NEWBORN diapers stacked in one corner of the nursery-to-be. Incredibly, they did not have a 10-pound baby, not for a few weeks anyway, and she did use all of them.
There’s not an equal girl to guy ratio around here but on average the women use twice as much. Which means in my convoluted math whiz brain I need to buy 4 times as much for the women.
Americans go into a store and find three tomatoes left in the produce aisle. They think there’s a shortage and the world is about to end. So far in my reality what’s really happening is that the re-supply truck is late arriving. Or the day Something Terrible happened to the avocados en route and when the trailer was opened they were found to be in mostly liquid form, along with some impressively offensive odors. OMG!!! The End Is Nigh!!! No - we’ll have more avocados in a day or so. Calm down.
“Shortages” in the US mean that the overall supply is lower. The result is that the item is more likely to sell out, perhaps very quickly, on a given day or week and the prices go up. It doesn’t mean “vanish forever” or whatever term the fearmongers on social media are using at the moment.
“Stocking up” is buying a limited amount you plan to use over a specified period of time. Ideally done thoughtfully and gradually over a period of time, then maintained at a specified level.
“Hoarding” is buying all you can grab without any plan beyond “get stuff”.
I never ran out of TP during covid because, for years prior, I had had the habit of buying an entire year’s worth at a time at a warehouse store as a way to save money by buying in bulk. At the end of December. So, having bought a year’s worth in December 2019 I was in a good position in 2020 when the Great TP Crisis occurred.
But that wasn’t hoarding - as I said, for several years I had bought a specified amount to be used in a specified amount of time, and maintained no more than that (not the least because I don’t have a lot of storage space). I certainly didn’t run out to buy even more.
I hope Great Depression Dire doesn’t occur but it is possible, and I think we’re closer to it than we have been for a very long while.
I get pissed off at the people like in the linked YouTube clip who trade on fear and panic. Nothing wrong with taking a few steps to give yourself some cushion/back up. What would be wrong is turning your life upside down over fear of what might happen.
^ This.
Planning for urbanites differs from planning for rural people.
Yes. My kitchen stool is an indispensable tool for reaching the stuff I have in upper cabinets and over the fridge. Both active spaces because I don’t have much room.
One obvious thing is that women not only use TP for both waste streams (so to speak) but women pee multiple times per day (the other thing is, for most people, much less frequent). So, all things being equal, including the amount used per… >ahem< … session women will use more TP than men will. For woman of “child bearing age” there will, on average, be one week out of four when they may use even more due to the need for more clean up.
That said - the rate of consumption you report is impressive. There were a few times back in the days I was still menstruating where a major clean up was required to prevent the toilet area from looking like a small animal had been butchered there when I might have used that much TP but that was infrequent. Very infrequent, thank Og.
I can’t figure out what she’s doing with all that, either. Has there been a proliferation of tissue paper flower arrangements in your home whenever she visits?
More seriously - some people use a minimal amount of toilet paper. Others use large wads of it. The latter use more per day/week. I think Cecil did a column on the topic way back in the day. That is also a factor.
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