What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage | Hacker News Reader

What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage

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74 pointssmacktoward79 comments

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.

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-nac... , I assume the 100% was for the whole of March [2] https://www.20min.ch/schweiz/news/story/Feuchttuecher-bedroh...

I didn't say there wasn't some element of increased demand due to more home use, I was responding to the article's assertion that nearly all of the shortage was a result of that.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

TP near me ran out before any closures happened.

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.

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.

I find that kind of impressive since the "baking" section is down to a single aisle at the super market these days and suddenly it's quite popular. Ideally a number of post pandemic people will continue with the baking. It is so much cheaper to make your own bread.

> It is so much cheaper to make your own bread.

Only if you don't value your time, and ignore the energy costs of running an oven. It's a good backup option in a pandemic because flour keeps longer than bread, but normally for most professionals it's much cheaper to earn the money and buy bread that's produced in bulk.

> normally for most professionals it's much cheaper to earn the money and buy bread that's produced in bulk.

I'm a professional engineer who's baked his own bread (exclusively, barring baguettes, ciabatta, and brioche - but plan to change the first two) for the last few years. I assure you I certainly didn't sacrifice any money to do so, and there wasn't even an opportunity cost - I wasn't going to otherwise earn money in that time, I don't bill hourly. ' It also barely even takes any time, 95% of breadmaking is waiting (passively) for something to happen. In fact, now that I think about it, I'm writing this comment at such a time. The cumulative time of actively doing something is really small.

> and buy bread that's produced in bulk

Once you've baked some bread you won't even want to buy that sugar-laden stuff 'produced in bulk'. If I had to buy it for some reason I'd want it from an actual bakery, not a supermarket shelf, or most supermarket 'bakeries'.

> Only if you don't value your time...

...which would otherwise be spent watching canned entertainment or going to the shop to get fresh bread...

> ...and ignore the energy costs of running an oven

...which are negligible

> normally for most professionals it's much cheaper to earn the money...

It would be if those "professionals" had to take time off work to bake bread but in practice this is not what they tend to do. I'm one of them, having baked my own bread from when I went to high school. The whole process takes several hours but the actual working time is around 10-15 minutes, tops - that is when you bake no-knead bread or use a machine to do the kneading. I start the dough after dinner when the rest of the family starts to watch some form of canned entertainment. I put the bread - two loaves - in the oven, well, in a few minutes from now - around midnight. Bake for ~32 minutes at 250°C, ready. In the intervening hours I do other things, from commenting here to hacking on things. No money spent, no billable hours lost. Also...

> and buy bread that's produced in bulk

...much nicer bread which was not produced in bulk, with ingredients I know and nothing more than that. No sugar, not too much salt like so many store-bought breads, no strange 'bread improvers'. I can cut the bread as thin or thick as I like. Those 2 loaves last us (2 adults, 2 children) for about a week.

The cost of the electricity is minimal. Maybe 30 cents or so in the US. But I agree with your basic point. If you consider bread baking a chore, you maybe save $4-5/loaf given artisan bread. (And, of course, less for even higher-end bread aisle bread.)

>it's much cheaper to earn the money and buy bread that's produced in bulk.

That said, most people don't have the option to directly turn hours of working into extra pay.

Done right it takes little time. Ingredients into the bread maker, leave it overnight, the rest in, leave it until evening then into a bannaton. Wait a bit then cool it. The main cost is remembering, as I’d spend less than 10 minutes on it over the 2 days. Maybe even less than 5 minutes.

It is vastly superior in taste but each to their own as applying my logic to everything you do would use up the entire week in no time.

There is a correlation between the mass production of bread and the decline in the amount consumed by the average person. The Chorleywood process has not done good things for the quality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process

A sample of the criticism: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-13670278

That has not been my experience.

It takes roughly 15-20 minutes for my wife (me it is closer to 30 minutes) of actual "mix, knead, and clean the dishes" time. Our oven uses roughly 3 kWH of electricity to bake the bread (I've got these fun little current transformers on all the circuits in my house, which lets me measure these things).

Wall clock time is roughly 2 hrs with two rises but during most of that time it does the work and the baker can do other productive work during that. My wife made a video[1] to demonstrate what was needed.

The recipe used in the video makes two 1.5 lb loaves of bread. The cost of materials is about $1, 3 kWH of power is about $0.60 in the Bay Area. A 24 oz loaf of bread at the bakery is $4 - $6 (so $8 to $12 for two), and at a grocery $3 - $5 ($6 - $10).

Given all of that; Comparing the marginal cost of using 30 minutes of your time over a span of two hourse at home to bake bread, compared to a trip to the grocery store to buy bread?

For the sake of argument, lets say it takes you the same time (30 minutes) to get in your car, drive to the store, pick up some bread, and drive home. You've spent 4x to 10x the outlay, gas + commercial bread price, versus the electricity + materials bread price.

So what was the marginal value of that 30 minutes? Let us also assume for the sake of argument that you actually need bread, which is to say whether you make it yourself or you go out and buy it you have determined that it was time to acquire two 24 oz loaves of bread.

As you may have guessed, my wife and I have discussed this at length and argued it about six different ways. And for me at least, I always end up find it impossible to come up with a plausible way of monetizing that 30 minutes with a better economic result and still end up with bread in the pantry.

I'm always open to discussion of how I could, as a systems guy I find these sorts of puzzles quite fascinating.

[1] The wife making bread, note that she normally kneads bread about twice this fast :-) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvBTxvX351U&feature=youtu.be

I wouldn't go to the grocery store just for bread. Amortized over all the other groceries it's very little effort to grab a loaf.

I guess if you practice enough you can make bread quickly, but I'm not picky about carbs and making rice with a rice cooker is like, 1 minute of effort, so hard to beat that.

I agree with you in principle, but I would point out that our long, precarious supply chains are the exact result of most professionals earning money to outsource things. I'm sure it's still a good deal, but it's less of a good deal than it looked like before supply chains started breaking left and right.

Those supply chains will recover after this once-per-century risk is over (eg we find a vaccine). For now I'm still way better off as a professional who can work from home and order food online, than I would be as a subsistence farmer somewhere.

And remember, being subsistence farmers without long supply chains didn't help the native Americans when Europeans arrived with a new plague they weren't immune to.

I didn't say you should become a subsistence farmer. Mine is more of a general argument about the costs of specialization.

And do you think the Native Americans were more or less specialized than the Europeans?

But the supply chains are not precarious at all, given what we've seen here. They're quite robust.

I live in western Washington, where the stores have been more or less out of toilet paper for weeks, and as far as I can tell, this thing is months from being over in the US. The supply chains haven't broken entirely yet, which is excellent and impressive, but in my personal opinion, the jury is still out on whether they're robust.

Toilet paper is scarcer here in Portland Oregon, but according to nextdoor, there is basically at least one store that has some everyday, and there are typically multiple.

This just doesn't feel like robustness to me, I guess. It feels precarious, and as far as I know, we haven't yet had time to feel the ripples from electronics supply chain disruptions in China, or the pharmaceutical supply chain disruption due to India understandably limiting exports.

I don't want to sound like all sour grapes, I've been hugely impressed with certain industries shifting production to make PPE on such short notice.

If this was all going to be over in two weeks, I'd say supply chains passed with flying colors, but it seems like this is just the beginning.

>> It is so much cheaper to make your own bread. > Only if you don't value your time,..

It's only cheaper to buy bread if you don't value quality :)

When I lived in the US bread worthy of human consumption was rare.

Lots (of not all) of it had added sugars and preservatives.

Really depends on how we define “value”. Baking, or gardening, etc — yes they “take time” away from other value generating activities. They can also be incredibly fulfilling and enjoyable tasks.

Most professionals don't work hourly, do they? Most get paid based on 40 hours per week (in the US).

Where I am it’s a packing problem, not a flour supply problem. Previously bakeries, cafes and restaurants bought big sacks every so often. That has stopped and homes are now wanting 1,2 or 5kg bags and there aren’t any. The flour is available but in the wrong bags.

My grocery store is doing this with rice and flour. I assume they're sourcing both from restaurant suppliers selling the large bags.

People who are unemployed should buy wholesale flour and repackage

That is everyone right now. New Zealand is on a complete lockdown. No travel, essential services allowed only.

Just like toilet paper, it seems.

Yeast shortage no doubt. Flour and sugar all day; but yeast is flat out gone.

> Yeast shortage no doubt. Flour and sugar all day; but yeast is flat out gone.

Time to learn to make sourdough, then!

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.

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.

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.

Yup, sourdough is easy and fun! The easiest pet too!

You know you have bread yeast literally on every part of your body right? Just stick your foot in some flour, water, and sugar, and let it rise. Then, feed this starter (like sourdough), and mix in a spoonful or two with every bread recipe, and keep the starter like you would a sourdough starter.

Do I wash the foot first? :)

(Sorry, I couldn't help but ask, hehe)

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

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?

I was buying non-perishable food easily (it all looked fully stocked) for weeks while TP was sold out.

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.

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?

> 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?

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.

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?

> 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?

This causes me to use significantly more "squares" when at work. Nothing I can do about the sand-paper effect though.

People will steal good toilet paper, that’s why commercial mounts and rolls are so different compared to ones for residences.

There's a really simple answer here: it's cheap and good enough and at this point no one expects any better.

Thinner TP clogs the pipes less often. At least that's the explanation I heard.

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.

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

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.

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"

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.

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

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.

Relatives went through WW2 with no tp. It's the last thing you care about running out of, there are plenty of alternatives.

I also suspect it a thing everybody can relate to.

It's the lowest common denominator of things people can run out of -- so we hoard it, like there is no tomorrow.

And it's risk free, because you'll go through it eventually.

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.

Yes, but most people 1) do not realize that, and 2) would not want to change their butt-wiping habits even if they did.

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.

Bidets have become extremely hard to come by as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Part of the reason is apparently, that it is bulky, so industry tries to limit storage.

Round for round there is nothing more compact than 22lr. Maybe you are right; but having worked at a range, we used to buy pallets at a time of it. The demand was definitely more than production supply.

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)?

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.

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.

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