Wipe!

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.