8 ms·

What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage

74 points by smacktoward 7y ago

FPGAhacker 7y ago
This does seem like a contributing factor, but the TP run started before the mass shift to work from home / self quarantine.
- eppp 7y ago
  I read back in mid-late February that Hawaii had shelves empty of toilet paper. It was only a matter of time for that to spread to the mainland. Did no one pay attention to what was happening?
  - twomoretime 7y ago
    Well, those of us trying to warn people as early as January were met with not only disbelief, but generally ridicule. This pandemic is a cultural failure. Humans in developed nations have gotten too comfortable and too dependent on their government. No general anticipation of severe disaster. We need to move the pendulum a couple notches back toward individualism, and I think that's going to happen naturally if we're about to experience Great Depression 2.0.
  - creato 7y ago
    I was buying non-perishable food easily (it all looked fully stocked) for weeks while TP was sold out.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Right, I think the article glances on that the trigger was a panic, but that it’s continued might not be. However the article mentions bananas as a similar thing that the commercial versions aren’t what people want at stores... it doesn’t explain why toilet paper is one of the only major non-virus related items. Isopropyl and peroxide are unavailable, but those are obviously virus related. So if the author is right, why aren’t we seeing of items face the toilet paper shortage, unless the answer is at least partially hording?
pedrocr 7y ago
This would be a reason for gradual supply issues as quarantine goes into effect. That's not what happened, we had a huge spike. It also happened right after clickbait hungry journalists all over the world started running this story, even when it hadn't happened in their particular location. So that's a much more likely explanation. Supply chains can adapt to 40% increases over weeks. They will visibly struggle with 10x increases over days.
theandrewbailey 7y ago
> Talk to anyone in the industry, and they’ll tell you the toilet paper made for the commercial market is a fundamentally different product from the toilet paper you buy in the store... The paper itself is thinner and more utilitarian. I can't be the only one that wondered what's up with that. I've purposefully held a #2 until I got home just so I can use better TP. Maybe that's the point?
- notfromhere 7y ago
  People will steal good toilet paper, that’s why commercial mounts and rolls are so different compared to ones for residences.
- dpc_pw 7y ago
  Thinner TP clogs the pipes less often. At least that's the explanation I heard.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    I don't know, I use significantly more under those conditions, so it might be roughly a net-0 in terms of paper going through the pipes. Also, commercial toilers typically have a wicked strong flush to them which would probably overcome typical TP use, double use, a roll of paper towels, and maybe even a small tree.
  - goldcd 7y ago
    Not sure that's true. Domestic stuff is "light and fluffy" - basically breaks down the moment it hits water. Commercial stuff tends to be "dense" - reclaimed fibres glued together and compacted to fit the most on a giant roll
- twomoretime 7y ago
  There's a really simple answer here: it's cheap and good enough and at this point no one expects any better.
- omgwtfbyobbq 7y ago
  I'm the only person I know who prefers the thinner/harder stuff. I love when $Store runs a buy $X amount of toiletries get $Y gift card because I can load up on their generic version of $Hard TP.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mark-r 7y ago
The even easier explanation is that it's the one thing you don't ever want to run out of.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Eh... there are a million things you can use in place of toilet paper. Food is much more important but for the most part the supply chains have kept up there. Installed bidet sprayers on all our toilets last year, I care not for your TP panic! We have 8 rolls in the house, that’ll last us another 2 months or so.
  - NateEag 7y ago
    Yes, but most people 1) do not realize that, and 2) would not want to change their butt-wiping habits even if they did.
    - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
      Learning new wiping habits was one of the best parts of traveling around the world. USA #1, but we have a thing or two to learn about butts.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    Bidets have become extremely hard to come by as well.
- beervirus 7y ago
  It also lasts forever. If you have room to store it, there's no downside to stocking up when you have the chance. And since everyone else is buying lots of it as well, there's an obvious upside--if you don't buy it today, you might not be able to buy it tomorrow.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Relatives went through WW2 with no tp. It's the last thing you care about running out of, there are plenty of alternatives.
taurath 7y ago
Grocery stores are still restocking really frequently as people have shifted from eating out to eating and cooking at home. Everyone is also learning to make bread and/or bake at the moment, because I haven't seen flour or sugar in stock consistantly for a while.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Yeast shortage no doubt. Flour and sugar all day; but yeast is flat out gone.
  - ardy42 7y ago
    > Yeast shortage no doubt. Flour and sugar all day; but yeast is flat out gone. Time to learn to make sourdough, then!
    - lostlogin 7y ago
      Yes! At its dumbest, just keep some dough from your last yeasted batch and feed it flour (70g flour, 100g water). Rise times go way up but that’s the point, you get more flavour that way.
    - OJFord 7y ago
      And the tl;dr is just 'mix some of the flour and water ahead of time, and leave it longer than you would've left the whole thing with yeast'. IMO 'sourdough' is hyped to such an extent that it makes it sound like it's going to be some complicated process requiring an exacting baker and a perfect recipe. It's not.
      - lostlogin 7y ago
        This is very accurate. The long and complicated books and blogs are really off putting. I’ve got my recipe almost to its minimum I think. Deleting steps as much as possible. The idea that the starter needs much care at all is crazy and I’m asked about it regularly. It can go many months without any attention at all and is just fine ~10 years in.
jimhefferon 7y ago
I think, and I suspect others think, that you don't want to be buying during the worst part. So I am buying ahead, and hoping that after the worst part I can buy behind.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
As with most things I suspect there is a bit of everything in the actual shortage (panic, lemming behavior, production limits, Etc.) I can attest to the fact that the commercial toilet supply paper people weren't (at least a few weeks ago[1]) particularly "low" on toilet paper. I assume that has only gotten less low since the number of people working from home means less used at the office. [1] When I ran engineering and operations for Blekko I hired the janitorial company for the space. I reached out to the owner of the company we had used and asked if he still had access to toilet paper and said he had plenty.
- adfm 7y ago
  A washlet beats a rag on a stick any day. You can lead a horse to sufficiently advanced technology, but you can’t make it think.
apetrovic 7y ago
Oh, bullshit. The shortage isn't because people are buying TP more often, the shortage is because a lot of people bought a lot of TP in short period of time. I don't live in US, and even if some morons here started hoarding TP, the majority of population acted more or less reasonably. I went to the store today, there's an usual amount of TP and paper towels in the shelves.
- dgritsko 7y ago
  Did you read the article? The argument being made (whether it's accurate or not, I have no idea) is that more people being home means shifting demand towards consumer TP and away from commercial TP, and pointing out that the supply chains for both are already highly optimized and not able to easily cope with such a dramatic shift in demand.
  - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
    TP near me ran out before any closures happened.
SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
This doesn’t explain why the effect is so obvious with toilet paper. I think it’s clear it was an irrational panic (the virus doesn’t make you shit yourself to death) and is now a “it’s rare so I must buy some!” Which is keeping it out of stock. The same thing happened with 22lr ammo on 2015/2016. It made NO DAMN SENSE that people were stocking up on the weakest round you can buy, but it was out everywhere for years. Some idiots started a panic, then otherwise rational people were buying any amount or brand they saw at high prices because they didn’t want to be out.... it was extreme irrational self-caused situation, I see nothing but similarity here.
- beart 7y ago
  Wasn't this also partially driven by the military buying up a ton of ammo? I know they don't use 22, but I thought it put a lot of pressure on the suppliers.
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    The US mil gets its ammo mostly from Lake City and Federal. The latter does make 22, but basically a separate company. It was election panic at first; the irrational buy-up. Everyone was out from European to Russian suppliers.
- AnotherGoodName 7y ago
  I think the cheapness is actually part of the reason certain things end up being targeted. You can spend a $100 on frozen meals at a supermarket and have 10 of them. They're a lot more practical for a 2 week quarantine but you're not going to make a dent in supermarket supply unless you're spending 1000's. So these things aren't targeted by hoarders. If you spent $100 on toilet paper however you've just wiped out a big chunk of the shelf stock. Others then see that the shelf is almost empty and you get a chain reaction.
- FrojoS 7y ago
  Part of the reason is apparently, that it is bulky, so industry tries to limit storage.
ineedasername 7y ago
Nope. You can't claim it's increased demand for consumer varieties under these conditions. Such increased demand of TP would see a fairly smooth increase in purchase & usage patterns as people ran out of their current supply and purchased their normal replenishment slightly more often. That's not the behavior we've seen. Indeed, if it had been that behavioral pattern, then the modest elasticity in production capacity (roughly 20% IIRC from manufacturers) would have been enough to smooth over the issue during the time necessary to ramp up further and perhaps repurpose commercial lines for consumer packaging. That isn't what happened. Near me, it literally disappeared overnight about 3-4 weeks ago, and hasn't come back since.
- FrojoS 7y ago
  I don't know one way or the other but I wouldn't be as sure as you are. Like others have said here, its probably a combination of many things, including a bit of a panic, but its an interesting analysis for sure. Yes, there was a bit of a 'bank run' effect. But it wasn't as huge as one might think. I saw some numbers for Germany from Spiegel.de and sales of toilet paper went up by 'only' ~100% (compared to 700% for hand sanitizer) [1]. Compared to the out-of-need increase of ~40% that is cited in the article here, that's not as huge a difference as I had assumed. If you assume that rational people are forward looking and are slightly stocking up with out panicking. Once there was an obvious shortage, people might have panicked a bit. But not for no reason. Here in Switzerland, the sewer system did get clogged up by toilette paper alternatives like wet wipes and cotton [2]. So it seems, that indeed some people ran out of toilet paper. Of course they should have used water instead. But it shows, that our just-in-time, high efficiency economy is very fragile, even without mass irrationality and panic. [1] I couldn't find today's source from a quick google search. But another article cites a 200% increase https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/corona-krise-nachfrage-nach-desinfektionsmittel-verachtfacht-sich-a-7befcedb-a1ee-4342-8bd7-bc5f8c8e59ec https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/corona-krise-nachfrage-nac... , I assume the 100% was for the whole of March [2] https://www.20min.ch/schweiz/news/story/Feuchttuecher-bedrohen-die-Abwassersysteme-23998381 https://www.20min.ch/schweiz/news/story/Feuchttuecher-bedroh...
  - ineedasername 7y ago
war1025 7y ago
The toilet paper shortage reminds me of an anecdote I heard about the 1970s gas shortages: "The country had more gasoline than ever, it was just in people's tanks rather than at the gas station"
bambax 7y ago
> There have been shortages in Hong Kong, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. All English-speaking countries, and, until now, moderately hit by the pandemic. I don't know about Italy or Germany (except that there seemed to be few photos of empty shelves running around the Internet), but I can testify that here in France, there is no visible toilet paper shortage, or people fighting in the aisles of the supermarkets to get the last roll. Yet all "rich" countries, with the possible exception of Japan, use toilet paper in the same manner. So why the difference between countries?
- tathougies 7y ago
  This is a form of mass hysteria. The media reports on some silly commodity like toilet paper having run out in one store (maybe they didn't get their delivery, unrelated to coronavirus at the early days). People take this signal to mean that toilet paper is going to run out. Now, afraid of being left without toilet paper, and worried that others are hoarding it for a reason they do not yet understand, others go to buy it. It's the same reason why people start buying ridiculous things when a celebrity is seen wearing them. People look at it, don't understand what's going on, but don't want to be left behind, so demand increases irrationally.
- FrojoS 7y ago
  Just from personal experience, the shortage also happened in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. So, it's not limited to Anglo-Saxon countries. Maybe France is an exception because of the popularity of the bidet?
goldcd 7y ago
erm no.. that doesn't even make sense The reason everybody is panic buying toilet paper, is because they read the stories and they see the empty shelves in the shops. So they then maybe grab the odd extra pack when they see stock - and the cycle continues until all domestic storage space is exhausted (or full shelves are seen again). Toilet paper is especially susceptible to this as it's cheap, has a supply chain designed for constant/continuous/even demand - and is bulky so tends to be produced relatively close to where it's consumed, magnifying these effects. Or in summary, you don't know what the future holds - but you know you're going to be ploughing through that decreasing pile of rolls in the cupboard. So in a capitalist market, why wouldn't they just make more and run the factory 24x7 (like say an RNA test or respirator maker)? Well because the actual consumption is a flat line. Sure, you could pay new workers to man the new night-shift - but then in a month or two you'd have to lay off both shifts, as we all work down our reserve and don't buy any TP.
- greedo 7y ago
  The article mentions that most TP factories are working at 100% capacity around the clock.
imchillyb 7y ago
Lets say people use bathroom facilities to do their drop, 2x per day. One at home, and another at a workplace. Being under a quarantine or 'shelter in place' order, people are now utilizing their own facilities 2x more than they were before. This isn't a linear increase, but an exponential increase in usage patterns. As more persons in the home stay home, more TP will be required to fulfill needs that were, up until this point in time, served by employers / schools / other facilities than their home. Add to the increase issue: Humans are generally -horrible- at making estimates. Budgets even if increased to account for additional usage may not account for things like wrapping sanitary napkins in a wad of tissue. Add to this that the children, who were at school all day and using the school facilities, are now home and using more TP than is normally required (if you have kids you know what I mean). Add to that the panic purchasers... and now we have a real problem that is not easily solved; unless by magic.
towb 7y ago
We had about a half to one week of empty shelves here, at least that was what I saw, wasn't there every day to look, no idea where it came from but glad it's not a problem at all anymore. Here in Sweden we have the raw material and the factories so the last thing that we'll run out of is toilet paper. Not sure how the situation is in other countries so i wonder... where is your toilet paper made? How long did you have to wait for it to get fully restocked (not just the sandpaper nobody buys in normal times)?
gdubs 7y ago
I have a picture in my mind of the global supply chain as a kind of chaotic system, that is usually in equilibrium and is currently, turbulently, adjusting to a new normal. Whatever that will be for the foreseeable future. It also makes me think of highway traffic. One person taps their breaks a little to hard and that ripples through the entire system creating waves of traffic that persist despite the initial event being small and seemingly inconsequential.
merlyn 7y ago
I don't buy it. If its all shifted away from the industry supply, why are all the industrial supply stores devoid of industrial TP as well? Just like all the baking supplies are gone from the stores, AND from the restaurant supply houses as well. There's not a 50# bag of flour to be found anywhere of those that that will actually sell to the normal consumer. Although that industry is very closed in on itself, around my area if you go in person, you have to show your corporate paperwork to get setup as a buyer, and you can't just drop into willcall to buy restaurant quantities of what they have without an account. I know other areas are different.

74 points by smacktoward 7y ago

This does seem like a contributing factor, but the TP run started before the mass shift to work from home / self quarantine.

eppp 7y ago
I read back in mid-late February that Hawaii had shelves empty of toilet paper. It was only a matter of time for that to spread to the mainland. Did no one pay attention to what was happening?
- twomoretime 7y ago
  Well, those of us trying to warn people as early as January were met with not only disbelief, but generally ridicule. This pandemic is a cultural failure. Humans in developed nations have gotten too comfortable and too dependent on their government. No general anticipation of severe disaster. We need to move the pendulum a couple notches back toward individualism, and I think that's going to happen naturally if we're about to experience Great Depression 2.0.
- creato 7y ago
  I was buying non-perishable food easily (it all looked fully stocked) for weeks while TP was sold out.
SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
Right, I think the article glances on that the trigger was a panic, but that it’s continued might not be. However the article mentions bananas as a similar thing that the commercial versions aren’t what people want at stores... it doesn’t explain why toilet paper is one of the only major non-virus related items. Isopropyl and peroxide are unavailable, but those are obviously virus related. So if the author is right, why aren’t we seeing of items face the toilet paper shortage, unless the answer is at least partially hording?

pedrocr 7y ago

This would be a reason for gradual supply issues as quarantine goes into effect. That's not what happened, we had a huge spike. It also happened right after clickbait hungry journalists all over the world started running this story, even when it hadn't happened in their particular location. So that's a much more likely explanation. Supply chains can adapt to 40% increases over weeks. They will visibly struggle with 10x increases over days.

theandrewbailey 7y ago

> Talk to anyone in the industry, and they’ll tell you the toilet paper made for the commercial market is a fundamentally different product from the toilet paper you buy in the store... The paper itself is thinner and more utilitarian. I can't be the only one that wondered what's up with that. I've purposefully held a #2 until I got home just so I can use better TP. Maybe that's the point?

notfromhere 7y ago
People will steal good toilet paper, that’s why commercial mounts and rolls are so different compared to ones for residences.
dpc_pw 7y ago
Thinner TP clogs the pipes less often. At least that's the explanation I heard.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  I don't know, I use significantly more under those conditions, so it might be roughly a net-0 in terms of paper going through the pipes. Also, commercial toilers typically have a wicked strong flush to them which would probably overcome typical TP use, double use, a roll of paper towels, and maybe even a small tree.
- goldcd 7y ago
  Not sure that's true. Domestic stuff is "light and fluffy" - basically breaks down the moment it hits water. Commercial stuff tends to be "dense" - reclaimed fibres glued together and compacted to fit the most on a giant roll
twomoretime 7y ago
There's a really simple answer here: it's cheap and good enough and at this point no one expects any better.
omgwtfbyobbq 7y ago
I'm the only person I know who prefers the thinner/harder stuff. I love when $Store runs a buy $X amount of toiletries get $Y gift card because I can load up on their generic version of $Hard TP.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mark-r 7y ago

The even easier explanation is that it's the one thing you don't ever want to run out of.

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
Eh... there are a million things you can use in place of toilet paper. Food is much more important but for the most part the supply chains have kept up there. Installed bidet sprayers on all our toilets last year, I care not for your TP panic! We have 8 rolls in the house, that’ll last us another 2 months or so.
- NateEag 7y ago
  Yes, but most people 1) do not realize that, and 2) would not want to change their butt-wiping habits even if they did.
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    Learning new wiping habits was one of the best parts of traveling around the world. USA #1, but we have a thing or two to learn about butts.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  Bidets have become extremely hard to come by as well.
beervirus 7y ago
It also lasts forever. If you have room to store it, there's no downside to stocking up when you have the chance. And since everyone else is buying lots of it as well, there's an obvious upside--if you don't buy it today, you might not be able to buy it tomorrow.
WalterBright 7y ago
Relatives went through WW2 with no tp. It's the last thing you care about running out of, there are plenty of alternatives.

taurath 7y ago

Grocery stores are still restocking really frequently as people have shifted from eating out to eating and cooking at home. Everyone is also learning to make bread and/or bake at the moment, because I haven't seen flour or sugar in stock consistantly for a while.

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
Yeast shortage no doubt. Flour and sugar all day; but yeast is flat out gone.
- ardy42 7y ago
  > Yeast shortage no doubt. Flour and sugar all day; but yeast is flat out gone. Time to learn to make sourdough, then!
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    Yes! At its dumbest, just keep some dough from your last yeasted batch and feed it flour (70g flour, 100g water). Rise times go way up but that’s the point, you get more flavour that way.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    And the tl;dr is just 'mix some of the flour and water ahead of time, and leave it longer than you would've left the whole thing with yeast'. IMO 'sourdough' is hyped to such an extent that it makes it sound like it's going to be some complicated process requiring an exacting baker and a perfect recipe. It's not.
    - lostlogin 7y ago
      This is very accurate. The long and complicated books and blogs are really off putting. I’ve got my recipe almost to its minimum I think. Deleting steps as much as possible. The idea that the starter needs much care at all is crazy and I’m asked about it regularly. It can go many months without any attention at all and is just fine ~10 years in.

jimhefferon 7y ago

I think, and I suspect others think, that you don't want to be buying during the worst part. So I am buying ahead, and hoping that after the worst part I can buy behind.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

As with most things I suspect there is a bit of everything in the actual shortage (panic, lemming behavior, production limits, Etc.) I can attest to the fact that the commercial toilet supply paper people weren't (at least a few weeks ago[1]) particularly "low" on toilet paper. I assume that has only gotten less low since the number of people working from home means less used at the office. [1] When I ran engineering and operations for Blekko I hired the janitorial company for the space. I reached out to the owner of the company we had used and asked if he still had access to toilet paper and said he had plenty.

adfm 7y ago
A washlet beats a rag on a stick any day. You can lead a horse to sufficiently advanced technology, but you can’t make it think.

apetrovic 7y ago

Oh, bullshit. The shortage isn't because people are buying TP more often, the shortage is because a lot of people bought a lot of TP in short period of time. I don't live in US, and even if some morons here started hoarding TP, the majority of population acted more or less reasonably. I went to the store today, there's an usual amount of TP and paper towels in the shelves.

dgritsko 7y ago
Did you read the article? The argument being made (whether it's accurate or not, I have no idea) is that more people being home means shifting demand towards consumer TP and away from commercial TP, and pointing out that the supply chains for both are already highly optimized and not able to easily cope with such a dramatic shift in demand.
- amanaplanacanal 7y ago
  TP near me ran out before any closures happened.

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago

This doesn’t explain why the effect is so obvious with toilet paper. I think it’s clear it was an irrational panic (the virus doesn’t make you shit yourself to death) and is now a “it’s rare so I must buy some!” Which is keeping it out of stock. The same thing happened with 22lr ammo on 2015/2016. It made NO DAMN SENSE that people were stocking up on the weakest round you can buy, but it was out everywhere for years. Some idiots started a panic, then otherwise rational people were buying any amount or brand they saw at high prices because they didn’t want to be out.... it was extreme irrational self-caused situation, I see nothing but similarity here.

beart 7y ago
Wasn't this also partially driven by the military buying up a ton of ammo? I know they don't use 22, but I thought it put a lot of pressure on the suppliers.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  The US mil gets its ammo mostly from Lake City and Federal. The latter does make 22, but basically a separate company. It was election panic at first; the irrational buy-up. Everyone was out from European to Russian suppliers.
AnotherGoodName 7y ago
I think the cheapness is actually part of the reason certain things end up being targeted. You can spend a $100 on frozen meals at a supermarket and have 10 of them. They're a lot more practical for a 2 week quarantine but you're not going to make a dent in supermarket supply unless you're spending 1000's. So these things aren't targeted by hoarders. If you spent $100 on toilet paper however you've just wiped out a big chunk of the shelf stock. Others then see that the shelf is almost empty and you get a chain reaction.
FrojoS 7y ago
Part of the reason is apparently, that it is bulky, so industry tries to limit storage.

ineedasername 7y ago

Nope. You can't claim it's increased demand for consumer varieties under these conditions. Such increased demand of TP would see a fairly smooth increase in purchase & usage patterns as people ran out of their current supply and purchased their normal replenishment slightly more often. That's not the behavior we've seen. Indeed, if it had been that behavioral pattern, then the modest elasticity in production capacity (roughly 20% IIRC from manufacturers) would have been enough to smooth over the issue during the time necessary to ramp up further and perhaps repurpose commercial lines for consumer packaging. That isn't what happened. Near me, it literally disappeared overnight about 3-4 weeks ago, and hasn't come back since.

FrojoS 7y ago
I don't know one way or the other but I wouldn't be as sure as you are. Like others have said here, its probably a combination of many things, including a bit of a panic, but its an interesting analysis for sure. Yes, there was a bit of a 'bank run' effect. But it wasn't as huge as one might think. I saw some numbers for Germany from Spiegel.de and sales of toilet paper went up by 'only' ~100% (compared to 700% for hand sanitizer) [1]. Compared to the out-of-need increase of ~40% that is cited in the article here, that's not as huge a difference as I had assumed. If you assume that rational people are forward looking and are slightly stocking up with out panicking. Once there was an obvious shortage, people might have panicked a bit. But not for no reason. Here in Switzerland, the sewer system did get clogged up by toilette paper alternatives like wet wipes and cotton [2]. So it seems, that indeed some people ran out of toilet paper. Of course they should have used water instead. But it shows, that our just-in-time, high efficiency economy is very fragile, even without mass irrationality and panic. [1] I couldn't find today's source from a quick google search. But another article cites a 200% increase https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/corona-krise-nachfrage-nach-desinfektionsmittel-verachtfacht-sich-a-7befcedb-a1ee-4342-8bd7-bc5f8c8e59ec https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/corona-krise-nachfrage-nac... , I assume the 100% was for the whole of March [2] https://www.20min.ch/schweiz/news/story/Feuchttuecher-bedrohen-die-Abwassersysteme-23998381 https://www.20min.ch/schweiz/news/story/Feuchttuecher-bedroh...
- ineedasername 7y ago

war1025 7y ago

The toilet paper shortage reminds me of an anecdote I heard about the 1970s gas shortages: "The country had more gasoline than ever, it was just in people's tanks rather than at the gas station"

bambax 7y ago

> There have been shortages in Hong Kong, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. All English-speaking countries, and, until now, moderately hit by the pandemic. I don't know about Italy or Germany (except that there seemed to be few photos of empty shelves running around the Internet), but I can testify that here in France, there is no visible toilet paper shortage, or people fighting in the aisles of the supermarkets to get the last roll. Yet all "rich" countries, with the possible exception of Japan, use toilet paper in the same manner. So why the difference between countries?

tathougies 7y ago
This is a form of mass hysteria. The media reports on some silly commodity like toilet paper having run out in one store (maybe they didn't get their delivery, unrelated to coronavirus at the early days). People take this signal to mean that toilet paper is going to run out. Now, afraid of being left without toilet paper, and worried that others are hoarding it for a reason they do not yet understand, others go to buy it. It's the same reason why people start buying ridiculous things when a celebrity is seen wearing them. People look at it, don't understand what's going on, but don't want to be left behind, so demand increases irrationally.
FrojoS 7y ago
Just from personal experience, the shortage also happened in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. So, it's not limited to Anglo-Saxon countries. Maybe France is an exception because of the popularity of the bidet?

goldcd 7y ago

erm no.. that doesn't even make sense The reason everybody is panic buying toilet paper, is because they read the stories and they see the empty shelves in the shops. So they then maybe grab the odd extra pack when they see stock - and the cycle continues until all domestic storage space is exhausted (or full shelves are seen again). Toilet paper is especially susceptible to this as it's cheap, has a supply chain designed for constant/continuous/even demand - and is bulky so tends to be produced relatively close to where it's consumed, magnifying these effects. Or in summary, you don't know what the future holds - but you know you're going to be ploughing through that decreasing pile of rolls in the cupboard. So in a capitalist market, why wouldn't they just make more and run the factory 24x7 (like say an RNA test or respirator maker)? Well because the actual consumption is a flat line. Sure, you could pay new workers to man the new night-shift - but then in a month or two you'd have to lay off both shifts, as we all work down our reserve and don't buy any TP.

greedo 7y ago
The article mentions that most TP factories are working at 100% capacity around the clock.

imchillyb 7y ago

Lets say people use bathroom facilities to do their drop, 2x per day. One at home, and another at a workplace. Being under a quarantine or 'shelter in place' order, people are now utilizing their own facilities 2x more than they were before. This isn't a linear increase, but an exponential increase in usage patterns. As more persons in the home stay home, more TP will be required to fulfill needs that were, up until this point in time, served by employers / schools / other facilities than their home. Add to the increase issue: Humans are generally -horrible- at making estimates. Budgets even if increased to account for additional usage may not account for things like wrapping sanitary napkins in a wad of tissue. Add to this that the children, who were at school all day and using the school facilities, are now home and using more TP than is normally required (if you have kids you know what I mean). Add to that the panic purchasers... and now we have a real problem that is not easily solved; unless by magic.

towb 7y ago

We had about a half to one week of empty shelves here, at least that was what I saw, wasn't there every day to look, no idea where it came from but glad it's not a problem at all anymore. Here in Sweden we have the raw material and the factories so the last thing that we'll run out of is toilet paper. Not sure how the situation is in other countries so i wonder... where is your toilet paper made? How long did you have to wait for it to get fully restocked (not just the sandpaper nobody buys in normal times)?

gdubs 7y ago

I have a picture in my mind of the global supply chain as a kind of chaotic system, that is usually in equilibrium and is currently, turbulently, adjusting to a new normal. Whatever that will be for the foreseeable future. It also makes me think of highway traffic. One person taps their breaks a little to hard and that ripples through the entire system creating waves of traffic that persist despite the initial event being small and seemingly inconsequential.

merlyn 7y ago

I don't buy it. If its all shifted away from the industry supply, why are all the industrial supply stores devoid of industrial TP as well? Just like all the baking supplies are gone from the stores, AND from the restaurant supply houses as well. There's not a 50# bag of flour to be found anywhere of those that that will actually sell to the normal consumer. Although that industry is very closed in on itself, around my area if you go in person, you have to show your corporate paperwork to get setup as a buyer, and you can't just drop into willcall to buy restaurant quantities of what they have without an account. I know other areas are different.