Where is all the toilet paper?

Help us build our application to find it for you.

One of the more surprising pieces of information that has come out of the Covid pandemic is how much Americans love toilet paper. And at Data Society, while we agree that toilet paper is important, we also identified a real problem behind the rolls.

Last year, we worked with the World Central Kitchen (José Andrés’ non-profit organization) to support disaster relief responders in providing emergency food relief. One of the key challenges that they faced was finding and ordering nutritious foods in an expedited manner — responders would sometimes travel to 4 or 5 stores in search of staples like bread, peanut butter, and milk. That is precious time taken away from providing families with the food that they needed. So we tackled the challenge to help decrease the time from grocery store to table.

Our data scientists developed an application that provided responders with data on supplies and nutrition at nearby grocery stores. This type of streamlining can save precious hours, which translates into our citizens’ wellbeing and stability during uncertain times.

For the past few weeks, the Data Society team has worked with our partners and clients to transition our data science training programs to be delivered remotely to help slow the spread of Covid-19. And while we’re happy that we can continue to serve our clients and help our students learn from home, we wanted to find other ways to support our community.

As we read about more and more people leaving grocery stores empty-handed, we saw an opportunity to help them by building on top of the minimum viable product that we created. We published a foundational dashboard to help people identify stores near them and see some inventory from the stores that we have data from.

However, we need your help to truly make it valuable to everyone for the weeks and months to come. Right now, we are looking to connect with grocery store chains such as Giant, Walmart, Target, Aldi, Costco, etc to get real-time data to their inventory. This will allow us to provide that data to the public and direct individuals to the right store near them so they don’t have to go to multiple stores or make multiple trips.

How does this benefit the grocery stores? People in your community will know when you’ve restocked and will be more efficient shoppers. How does this benefit the public? Shoppers will be able to get the groceries they need in fewer trips to limit their exposure outside.

If you know anyone who has access to this data and would be willing to work with our team to incorporate it into the dashboard, please contact us. Help us provide realtime information to people across the country.

And one last thought: if we do run out of toilet paper, maybe now’s the time to switch to bidets?