There is no toilet paper shortage.
I spent four years as a janitor in retail shops so I’ve seen a few stockrooms. They are, always, much smaller than the retail floor space. Almost all the stock in the shop is on the shelves.
The stockroom is loaded with the nonperishable, high profit items and those things that sell fast. Booze, dry foods with long shelf lives, that kind of thing. Fresh food has to be sold fast or they end up throwing it away. That’s generally replenished with the daily deliveries and not stored for very long before it’s out on the shelves.
Toilet paper is a low cost and very bulky item. It doesn’t get priority in the stockroom. They only have as much as they expect to sell over, say, a week.
Almost all the shop’s stock of arsewipes is out there on sale. Sudden lunatic panic buying will wipe out their entire stock in minutes.
Next day, in some shops overnight, a truck full of bumpaper will arrive. Almost all goes straight on the shelves, a small reserve goes in the stockroom.
Next morning, the Botty Brigade empty the shelves again and the small reserve is gone too.
The stockroom is limited in size. The shop cannot allocate more space to poo tickets, the packs are bulky and getting more in there means they’d have less space for the other things.
So, once again, empty shelves until the next delivery.
Empty shelves make it look like a shortage but it really isn’t. They’ll keep being restocked. What’s happening is that idiots are buying at a rate way above the shop’s capacity for stock.
What will happen once the lunacy is over is that the shelves will be full again and there’ll be a couple of dusty packs in the stockroom – because the idiots all have attics full to the brim with a mountain of fire hazard paper and won’t need to buy any more for years. Although, since they are also panic buying beans, it might not last that long.
The rumour that started this seems to be that the cardboard tubes are made in China so they might have to be taken away in case they’re contaminated with the Wuhan virus. These idiots have filled their houses with the only high risk thing in the shops.
It isn’t really all that risky. Cardboard has a drying effect – you should see the cracked hands of some of the stockroom workers, who handle cardboard boxes all day. The virus won’t survive long on it, and the cardboard tube factory might not even be in an infected area.
Also, you should really be washing your hands after taking a dump anyway. Bog paper is not bacteria – proof, its pores are big enough to let them through. Viruses have no problem getting through it. This new virus isn’t the only thing you can catch and spread with shitty fingers.
Al the shortages are illusion. Nothing is running out. People are simply buying beyond the shop’s ability to hold stock. It’s all refilled with the next delivery.
The shops, and manufacturers of the idiot magnets, must be loving this.
Next time China reports a new virus, I’m buying shares in Andrex.
I stocked up at Christmas. I got this 20% off if you spend £120 at Waitrose voucher. I’d already done my grocery shopping that week and the voucher was time limited. So someone suggested, why not buy some loo rolls. I bought 32 they were on offer at £7 a pack. I bought two packs . I don’t need to buy anymore for almost 3-6 months.
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You can buy them In branches of Savers or Farm Foods for half the price. Bargain , as it doesn’t really have a used value.
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Living out here, with the risk of being snowed or iced in in winter, as well as being appallingly antisocial, we tend to have at least a month’s supply of everything at any time anyway 😉
Except whisky. I dare not stock up too much of that… it won’t keep.
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I don’t care about the size of the stock room or if the manufacturer is doing overtime, if I go into Tesco and the shit roll shelves are naked, then to me that IS a shortage. I don’t understand these greedy, selfish morons. When this is all over they will have shit rolls piled to the ceiling with no hope of selling them on, and they’ll probably die of old age before the supply runs out.
Kitchen roll has also gone, so I’m expecting plumbers to make a mint on blocked bogs. Meanwhile I guess I’ll have to wipe my arse on a sock.
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It’s a virtual shortage caused by logistics and idiots. There’s plenty in the warehouses, the shops will simply order more but until every idiot’s home runs out of room to store it, it’ll keep disappearing.
When it stops (and it will), the huge stocks in the idiots’ homes will be utterly worthless, a vast space occupier and an enormous fire hazard.
As a Twitter comment said, ‘if you need 140 rolls of toilet paper for a 14 day quarantine, you should have been at the doctor’s long before now’.
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My loft is full of crappy low-energy dimbulbs.
A few years ago they were almost giving them away for 20p, so I bought 500, (several trolleys full).
Then they dropped the price to 10p, so I has to buy another 500.
The real problem with them is they’re dim for the first few minutes. So I don’t turn them off.
So the buggers last forever!
It’s the kids’ inheritance.
I probably shouldn’t have told anyone, though.
I paid 10p each, but all my mates steal mine for free, “cos you’ve got loads!”
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I took all mine out, those compact FL ones . Apparently they’re radioactive and bloody poisonous with Mercury in them. So I have a plethora of those type. You think I could shift them during this panicking session?
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Not if you are in the UK.. during the transition period the EU is phasing out CFL and halogen bulbs. LED only. Mind you those hoarding fools might just go for it. Just put it around that you can wipe your arse on them and they’ll be queuing at your door.
CFL bulbs are not radioactive. Its just a glass tube lined with phosphor and filled mainly with argon gas (an inert gas used in welding) and a very small amount of mercury vapour (too small to harm you). An electric current is passed through the gas and that excites the phosphor, making it glow.
They remind me of what it was like as a kid, waiting for the TV to warm up. By the time the picture appeared the program was almost finished. Quite useless in a place like a bathroom where the light is only used for a few minutes. Good riddance to a bad invention.
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The CFL ones also claimed they lasted 8 years. They didn’t mention that after a couple of years they still worked but barely gave out any light. The long warm up was a pain too.
I quite like the LED ones, although a failing one can flash in a particularly annoying manner. I’ll get a few halogen ones too for those places that need a lot of light – and some rooms here have dimmer switches. You can get LEDs that are dimmer-friendly but they are expensive!
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Indeed. I may just take the little ones to the dump. Though I found the 125watt ones to be ideal to kill insects.
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They can be hard to get rid of. I usually wrap dead ones in bubble wrap and bin them, then replace with an LED one.
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Once the toilet rolls have all gone, there will be a run on corks.
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And when the toilet rolls are back, pity those sewage plant workers!
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It’s insanity. In my local supermarket, they are also panic buying bottled water!
And pasta. Yet the shelves are full of pasta sauces, so….what are they planning to use the pasta with? Maybe they think they can wipe their bums with it, but really, that’s only going to work with the lasagne sheets…
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A diet of boiled plain pasta and baked beans… maybe they’ll need all those toilet rolls after all.
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I strongly suspect that a lot of the the food at least that’s being hoarded will end up being chucked.
We are in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. They’re just not dead.
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‘not dead’ – you sure?
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I saw it happen every Christmas. The shop closed Christmas day and Boxing day and people were buying as if the shops would never open again.
After Boxing day they were back for more. I’m sure most of it ended up in the bin.
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The company that owns Andrex is Kimberley Clark.
https://www.londonstockexchange.com/exchange/prices-and-markets/stocks/summary/company-summary/US4943681035DEUSDSSX4.html
And yes they’re bucking the trend, being one of the few shares to go up.
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We know what to buy shares in then lol 😂
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I had to check up on that, S.S. I thought it was Bowater-Scott, but Kimberley Clark bought Andrex to add to their Kleenex. ‘Paperware’ was one of my jobs when I worked in Presto’s supermarket a long, long time ago. It was arguably the most boring section in the whole shop. Maybe it was the boredom that made me study the packaging.
At one stage, I did detergents. That was almost as boring. What I found interesting, though, was that almost every single brand of washing powder was made by either Procter & Gamble or Unilever (I think it was called Lever Brothers back then). I mean Ariel, Persil, Surf, Bold, Daz, Fairy, etc.made by just two companies, yet they competed with each other on telly all the time. Why?
It was all so long ago that, as I recall, the checkout staff was only ever ladies. Us blokes were on our feet all day, rushing around. The men got equality in the end.
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The different “brands” are just an ongoing experiment in marketing. What shape of box, what colour box, what colour product, what smell, what level of promotion, etc gives the best return.
There’ll never be a final definitive answer, because when they find one the customer will go for something different, for novelty.
Marketing is the only branch of psychology that knows what it’s talking about, because they do real experiments. As science should!
And the science is never “settled”. 🙂
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It’s a very long experiment. I started in retail in 1979 while still at school. I haven’t really watched telly for the past 15 years, so I don’t know if they’ve moved on from the Daz Doorstep Challenge. My conscience could no longer allow me to fund the BBC. I should be allowed to watch ITV, etc., as I pay for it by buying branded washing powder, fairy up liquid, etc., but I stick to DVDs. I have my own Stewie TV channel.
Each and every month I get a letter from TVLicensing with various levels of threatening language. “We have started an investigation at this address.” Have you, now? Well, have fun with that. It makes me happy to think of the money they’re wasting. My telly is so old that it glows orange through the slits at the back. I can’t even receive their rubbish broadcasts, but I don’t see why I should tell them that.
But, yes, there’s’ a lot of psychology in retail, so I guess they know what they’re doing. There are a lot of cheap tricks too, like putting the bread and milk as far away from the entrance as possible, so that you have to walk past a few thousand products that you didn’t intend buying.
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I once worked for a market research company which was commissioned by Andrex. The unsuspecting public was asked the classic question, “If Andrex was a person what kind of person would it be?” More than one respondent asked if it was a wind up 🙂
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If Andrex was a person, he would have to be soft, strong and very, very long. So, I would be thinking about Robert Wadlow. Although I don’t know how soft he was. Maybe a great big softie?
What did people say?
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If TV licensing show up, invite them inside, close the door, have a coughing fit and tell them you’re self-isolating 😉
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It’s a lovely idea, but in all seriousness, from what I’ve read and seen (on YT!), in no way should you let them into your house. I understand that their basic pay is so low that they need a few catches every week (or is it every day?) to earn a living wage and some goons aren’t worried about fabricating evidence.
I have a video camera to hand should I encounter them. I’ve had a ‘we called’ card already. Previously, all I did was phone them every two years to say that I still don’t need a licence. The person on the phone would tell me that someone might come round and check. I told them that they wouldn’t get in and that was that until 3 1/2 years ago, the biennial letter arrived, but this time I thought, why should I have to report in like I’m on probation? So I stopped reporting in. Forty letters later and they’ve still not given up.
Who else do you need to call to say you don’t want something? You contact people when you do want something. Why do they think they’re so special, I wonder? As if you can’t live without the TV, so you must be a liar.
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Probably best to say nothing, even on the doorstep, as they could twist your words around.
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I had a TV licence because when my dad visited, he liked to watch it. It wasn’t used at other times, other than for DVDs or Playstation or streaming YouTube. Now he’s gone there’s no need for a licence any more. I expect the letters to start soon.
As you say, the YouTube videos suggest that engaging with them in any way is a bad idea. They try so many illegal tricks, even with police officors as accessories to those tricks, and get away with it.
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You can’t expect the cops to understand the law, especially on things like this and free speech.
Of course, you don’t need a licence for watching DVDs, just telly going out live (so streaming videos requires one).
It can be a bit depressing not having telly, especially when there’s a Champions League match you want to watch and you can’t/don’t/daren’t go to the pub. It’s not all bad, though. I finally managed to get around to reading some of the books I bought a long time ago.
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My husband just pondered, whilst washing up from dinner, if the whole Coronavirus is a “just marketing” because the two food substances being stockpiled are rice from China and pasta from Italy. I was enjoying an after dinner smoke and reading Edward Bernays wiki page…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
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https://twitter.com/MatthewFoldi/status/1238868585168207873
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I don’t remember that Fairy ad at all. Mind you, I was mostly the worse for drink in those days.
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bidet)
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Thank you for “poo tickets”: that’s going in the family phrases vault!
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Now, there may not be a physical shortage as such, but if the supply chain is disrupted due to everything being closed down, then it amounts to the same thing.
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William, Make it known to the fearful that those at the sharp end have no intention whatsoever in denying them a bit of re-formed wood to smear all over their rectums.
It’s in Dutch, don’t understand a word he says, but I get his meaning – and his sentiment. 110 seconds and a good belly laugh.
https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=alsng_1584290111
29,000 views in 15 hours. This one’s going to high six figures – fast!
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Dear Mr L
Hoarding toilet rolls is the least of people’s insanity. Read this and weep.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-51857722
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It’s ‘The Good Life’ without the funny parts 🙂
If civilisation falls apart, the last place you want your food supply is in the garden of a suburban terraced house – with no functioning chimney.
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