Toilet paper shortage has heroes and goats
Each of us has a story. This one made the paper. To suggest someone for the US column, which runs every Monday, email uscolumn@post-gazette.com.
At our house, I was a momentary hero. Back in midFebruary — before the local COVID-19 crisis got underway — I went to buy cat food and while there impulsively bought generic toilet paper. No bale, as I’d prefer, but a handy nine-pack.
In the car, I got to thinking that my wife, Suellen, would be mad. “We already have 500 rolls,” she’d proclaim. So for psychological safety, I stashed it deep in the trunk of my car.
Then the COVID crisis hit hard, inciting a toilet-paper-buying frenzy reminiscent of Black Friday shoppers fighting over TickleMe Elmos, with post-apocalyptic empty shelves and shopping carts overloaded with so much toilet paper that you’d think they had pet elephants or were building pyramids.
“While we don’t have insight on consumer habits during this time, I can share that we are producing and shipping P&G Family Care products, including Charmin, at record high levels,” said Loren Fanroy, spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble. “Demand continues to outpace supply, but we are working diligently to get product to our retailers as fast as humanly possible so everyone can continue to ‘Enjoy the Go.’”
The same thing for Kimberly-Clark Corp., which makes Cottonelle and Scott brands.
“We have plans in place to address the increased demand for our products to the extent possible, including accelerating production and reallocating inventory to help meet these needs,” said Kimberly-Clark spokesman Terry Balluck, noting the need to “help ensure the continued supply of our essential products.”
During the Great Depression, people used newspaper as toilet paper.
But reports nationwide tell of people clogging their toilets by using paper towels, baby wipes, napkins, facial tissue and other pipe cloggers.
Vice News has reported that “Panic-buying preppers have diminished Australia’s toilet paper supply to the point where it is now being treated as currency.” A Far North Queensland cafe is offering “coffee for a loo roll.” Its manager told ABC that toilet-paper hoarding was evident when people began stealing it from his cafe restroom.
So he took to social media with an offer to “swap either a takeaway coffee for three rolls of toilet paper, or a 1-kilogram bag of beans — valued at $42 — for a pack of 36 rolls.”
“We were starting to look at newspapers, paperbark trees, or even coffee leaves. That’s how comical it became,” he said.
Reports from Hong Kong claim toilet paper is so rare that people are paying exorbitant prices, with some even giving it as gifts.
Now come a bunch of toilet-paper Freuds claiming that hoarding toilet paper is “primal, even infantile,” with other psychological explanations for roil over roll hoarding.
In a Los Angeles Times letter to the editor, one psychotherapist said that during times of “fear and uncertainty, we grasp for something, anything, that is under our control.”
Other readers called for limits on how much toilet paper, hand sanitizer and water could be sold to one customer. We need legislation, with one pronouncing that hoarding “shows a total lack of understanding of current epidemiological dynamics.”
That led to thank-yous to “the poor workers” trying to stock shelves while panic rages around them. “They are the true heroes of the crisis.”
Hmm? I’m thinking of nurses, doctors and paramedics.
“Read a newspaper, then use it as toilet paper,” said another. Here we go again.
As the days pass, the crisis widens and toilet paper — people average three rolls a week, I read — remains scarce.
And so it happened. One recent day during sheltering-in, Suellen announced, behold, we are low on toilet paper and we needed to face infection and “find some somewhere.”
I feigned dire concern. I had no coffee or beans to trade for this essential product. We would no longer Enjoy the Go. I didn’t have $200 that some Hong Kongese reportedly were paying for it. At that cost I’d buy a bidet.
So, using my practiced Muppet acting skills, I shrugged, sighed and slumped.
Then I quietly sneaked to my car, popped the trunk and grabbed the hidden treasure. I returned to the kitchen holding it high in the air. She’d later remarked that I resembled Sidney Crosby raising the Stanley Cup.
Crowds were cheering. News trucks lined the driveway. Fireworks were bursting.
No, but she did hug it (rather than me) and utter the hero word. And for a mere nanosecond, she had stars in her eyes.