March 10th, 2005
Folks who read my rants, such as this one, may start to think that I have a toilet paper (TP) fetish. I apologize beforehand for this, but you should be aware that today's rant is against the blatant abuse of my thin consumerism, not really about toilet paper at all. It is about large paper companies that think people won't notice what they are up to.
I am talking about the rapidly diminishing number and size of sheets of toilet paper per roll, about the misleading terms that paper companies have set up to confuse the consumer; I am talking about the size of the sheets diminishing--and how we're not supposed to notice; and, finally, I am talking about all the little intelligence-insulting tricks the paper companies are employing in order to hide from us the fact that we are buying less and less TP each time we buy a package.
The great shrinking sheet count caper
OK, times may be tough, but let's not just make things smaller and keep the price the same, shall we? Remember when 400 sheets were what you got in a roll of TP? Then the number steadily marched down to 350, 300, and 250, until its current number of (usually) 198. At around the time the numbers started shrinking, they also introduced this idea of a "double roll" which was, at first, about 500 or 600 sheets. But even that number is marching down steadily ... first to 450, then below 400 to (usually) 396 sheets. But the term "double roll" is a self-referential, mostly meaningless statement anyway. "Double" of what, exactly? Well, double of a roll half its size, of course. And that is what the paper companies call a "normal roll". But those terms are completely made up; convenient but misleading terms for folks to get confused by as they stand in the supermarket aisles with their exhausted children crying and clinging to their pant legs.
Short-sheeting isn't even funny as a college prank
Now, the paper companies know that just changing the number of TP sheets will get spotted too quickly, and CYA ("Cover Your Ass") is a mantra everywhere, including the Consumer Relations divisions of paper companies. So they "cleverly" lowered the price somewhat in order that they can claim, "Sure, we lowered the sheet count, but we lowered the price, too!" What they conveniently forget to tell you is that they are making the sheets themselves smaller! They have shrunk from 11.2 cm to 10.2 cm. If you calculate the reduction in price of, say, 25% when they went from 400 sheets to 300 sheets, you might think, "Ah, well, 25% fewer sheets, but 25% lower price, too" and not notice that the total length of all the sheets together is about 9% smaller as well! You may be paying less for less product, but the price per centimetre is more.
You don't even have to look carefully anymore
When I was a child, I would raid the cookie jar in a meticulous and (to my mother) intelligence-insulting manner: I would break off a little piece of one cookie, then another. I would keep a whole one on top of the pile, but remove crumbs and pieces of cookie from below. To my little eyes, it looked as though I was hiding the fact that cookies were disappearing. I think that my attempts to hide the cookie "theft" were more irritating to my mother than the actual disappearance. Well, either way, she wasn't fooled; I frequently got busted for "stealing" cookies.
I mention this because the paper companies are trying the same sort of thing with their TP rolls:
First, they puff up the rolls as much as possible by putting air between the sheets to make them thicker. This method has been capitalized on by sales and marketing folks as "softer paper!!!" But what they fail to mention (or perhaps fail to care about) is that only the roll is softer. Once the paper is rolled out, it is the same paper it has always been.
Also, they have this concept of plies. Consumers operate under the mistaken notion that 2 plies are twice as thick as 1-ply. No. There are just 2 layers that are each as close to 1/2 the thickness of the single layer as possible. But what the extra ply does is make the roll more puffy, just like above. It is not twice as much paper. And paying extra for it is just a cheap money grab. It is roughly the same amount of TP, but with more air between the sheets.
Now we come to the biggest insult of them all: The ever-rising size of the paper roll in the middle. The radius of this cylinder just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Though it makes the roll appear somewhat larger, it also makes the roll more unstable and loose on the dispenser axle. This really is the easiest of them all to spot. I frequently look at the centre-roll size and cringe in the supermarkets. I get insulted when I see that because somebody somewhere is hoping that I and folks like me won't notice the centre-roll size and instead appreciate that the diameter of the whole TP roll is larger. Huh ... not bloody likely. It just insults my powers of observation.
What to do? What to do?
Well, there's not a whole lot we can do, is there? Paper companies aren't suddenly going to start enlarging the sheet count or putting more sheets onto the rolls are they? I doubt that even a concerted consumer complaint campaign would change their dirty tricks of massaging the apparent size of the roll, while lowering the amount of product.
Personally, I use a combination of factors to determine which to buy. It's useless, of course; they are screwing me out of my money more and more no matter what I do. But at least I can gain a small sense of empowerment over the companies by using a qualitative-based combination of these factors:
Weight of package (making sure I compare same-numbered rolls of packages)
Price (sometimes the "double rolls" are on sale)
Convenience: It is a pain to constantly replenish the roll, so sometimes the bigger roll is a better deal for the sake of convenience.
I imagine that if I were to bring a calculator and figure out the exact cost per metre of all the toilet paper, I would discover that none of them is particularly better than the others. But maybe I'll try that anyway some time. If I do you will almost definitely read about it here ... :-)