As the COVID19 pandemic hit the US, with school and office closures rapidly following its arrival, Americans began to stock up for the long haul. Unsurprisingly the stocking up led to some shortages. Stores rapidly ran out of hand sanitizer, cleaning supplies, and any number of perishable goods. But the item we heard about most often, and most derisively, was toilet paper.
Who were these crazy people stocking up on toilet paper? The mockery was everywhere. The Atlantic brought out a story comparing the current COVID19 TP buyers with people in 1973 who stockpiled TP in response to a joke Johnny Carson made on his show. The higher demand for TP is characterized everywhere as an overreaction and a moronic response to misinformation. The mockery has gotten so bad that last night my kids made fun of me for having part of a Costco sized pack of TP in our storage closet. It made no difference that I’d bought the TP well before the crisis and the quarantines. It didn’t matter that I’ve bought the same pack of TP on every Costco trip I’ve made since having children. Suddenly, Mom was a figure of fun for doing exactly what she always did.
I explained to the kids that, instead of one man being at home for most of the day on most days of the week, our household (and our TP supplies) now faced one man and three women at home all day, every day. That seemed likely to change our consumption rates of all kinds of things–including TP.
It seemed like a good time for a little bit of Momonomics.
I asked my kids to count the number of rolls of TP in place in our bathrooms today, March 20th. They’re with their dad this weekend, so we’ll recount when they get back, for a rough estimate of how much paper we use under ordinary–pre-COVID19 circumstances. And I’ll ask them to recount on Friday the 27th. That should give us a decent estimate of how much TP we use as a family in a week. Then we can estimate how long what we have on hand should last us and decide if Mom is nuts, or just a pretty good planner.
I invite you to get your kids to do the same and report back their findings in the comments to my follow up post on the 27th.
READER COMMENTS
john hare
Mar 20 2020 at 12:40pm
I was doing a bid yesterday and the pandemic craziness came up as it usually does lately. Almost all of the time I do bids, they are for people with considerable respect for self sufficiency and very little for government dependence.
I would have messed up getting the job if I had missed a couple of hints that this was a different breed of cat. He said the government should have stepped in long ago on the TP crisis as it prevent one of the main disease vectors if people can’t wipe. I was barely able to not disagree in the strongest terms.
BW
Mar 21 2020 at 2:54am
What does “doing a bid” mean, in this context?
john hare
Mar 21 2020 at 5:24am
I do construction work. Going to the prospective jobsite and going over the project with the customer then putting together a bid number. Apologies for the shorthand expression.
Dylan
Mar 21 2020 at 8:46am
I too thought the hoarding of toilet paper was ridiculous, but of course, we’ve now not been able to get tp in the grocery stores for about a week here. We typically only have two weeks worth in the apartment, and were getting close to running out until I saw that one of the places in the neighborhood that doesn’t normally carry such things, got a small order in and we were able to pick up a package that should last us a month or more. But, at the same time, we learned that this store will be closing for at least a month because they can’t get enough supplies from their distributors to stay in business.
Mark Brady
Mar 21 2020 at 4:10pm
I expect that Sarah, and any other readers who enjoy the humanities, will appreciate the historical and literary references in this article that is nearly thirty years old but still relevant to these times.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/paper-wars-theres-a-battle-going-on-in-the-bathrooms-of-britain-hester-lacey-reports-from-the-1502719.html
anon
Mar 22 2020 at 4:48am
One could argue that having a bidet has always been a better choice all around. I am considering it, if only to cut down on my material waste stream. Sad it took a crisis for many people to come to this conclusion.
J Mann
Mar 23 2020 at 12:33pm
Unfortunately, in the absence of price gouging, hoarding becomes somewhat rational – if you see TP in the store, there’s no way to know when you will ever see any again, and the price is quite cheap, so it makes sense to buy it up. And while you may share some with people you like or have affinity for, there’s not much incentive to sell it to people you don’t know.
On the other hand, people really hate price gouging.
And on the third hand, I don’t think anti-hoarding laws work well. Stores can do a little by setting quantity limits per purchase, but even then, it runs out fast.
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