Shrinkflation: Toilet Paper
Changing the toilet roll twice a day set me thinking, are toilet rolls getting smaller?
And guess what? They are! And not by a small amount either!
When I was a kid, we used newspaper and had a nightsoil man collect our dunny can every week. Of course, we called him the “dunny man”. I hope he was paid a decent wage because who would want to do that job?
When we moved to a house with a flush toilet, I suppose we used toilet paper. I have no real memory of this. I don’t remember ever having to change the roll though so I looked up some statistics.
Once upon a time there was one specification for toilet tissue. It was a 4.5in x 4.5in sized sheet, with 500 2-ply sheets to a roll, and 96 rolls to a case. Everyone sold the same spec and life was good.
I’m changing the toilet roll twice a day and there’s only two of us at home, so I looked at the rolls I had bought on special. How many sheets were there in a roll? 250, maybe? You know half the size? Nope, there were 140 sheets! No wonder I’m changing the roll so frequently!
So are these 140 sheet rolls commensurately cheaper than the larger roll of days gone by? You have to be joking. As the size got smaller by increments, the price increased. That’s shrinkflation.
