Isn’t toilet paper almost always produced domestically? It takes up a lot of space compared to its value, so it’s inefficient to transport. Potato chips are similar.
Toilet paper is an example of “self-fulfilling prophecy”. It will run out because people will believe it will run out, causing a bank toilet paper run.
Makes me feel confused about Economics 101. If people can easily predict that the toiler paper will run out, why aren’t the prices increasing enough to prevent that.
Standard price-gouging and auction problem. Same reason Taylor Swift doesn’t raise her prices or auction tickets off, but blames her shabbos goy instead.
There’s also a question of what does ‘running out of toilet paper’ mean? Back in Covid Round One, there wasn’t a real toilet paper shortage. I didn’t see a single empty shelf of toilet paper. (I did, however, see a giant pyramid of toilet paper rolls at Costco stacked on a pallet/forklift thingy, serving as a reminder that “every shortage is followed by a glut”, but the glut never gets reported.) Maybe it happened in my town in between my visits or in another store, maybe it didn’t, but if I didn’t read social media, I would have no idea there was supposed to be any such thing. Millions of people were not being forced for months to relieve themselves in an open field like they were in India… When people say ‘America ran out of toilet paper’, what they really mean is, ‘I saw a lot of photos on social media of empty shelves and people talking about how late capitalism has failed’ (and at this point, even if they claim to have had toilet paper problems themselves, we know from retrospective memory studies like of 9/11 that a lot of them didn’t). There’s no obvious way for everyone who sells toilet paper to ensure that there is never an empty shelf anywhere ever which would yield a photo to go viral. (Especially not these days when people will just fake the photo with GPT-4o.) And that wouldn’t be economically viable to begin with: stockouts are normal, healthy, and good, because the level of stock which it would take to ensure 0% stockouts would be exorbitantly expensive. To the extent that an empty shelf becomes a political weapon to poison peoples’ minds, it’s a negative externality to whoever owns and operates that shelf. So that is no reason for them to raise the price of toilet paper enough to ensure it never happened.
(Another point to make would be that people can easily endure any brief fluctuations in toilet paper supply. It’s easy to economize on it and there are usually a lot of rolls in any household and lots of mediocre substitutes of the sort that were used before ‘toilet paper’ as a specialized category became the norm—like newspapers. There’s also paper towel rolls. If it were some big deal, then after the supposed horrible disaster of shortages during COVID, everyone would’ve immediately gone out and bought bidets as the most effective permanent method to insulate yourself from future shortages. But they didn’t.)
Isn’t toilet paper almost always produced domestically? It takes up a lot of space compared to its value, so it’s inefficient to transport. Potato chips are similar.
Toilet paper is an example of “self-fulfilling prophecy”. It will run out because people will believe it will run out, causing a bank
toiletpaper run.Makes me feel confused about Economics 101. If people can easily predict that the toiler paper will run out, why aren’t the prices increasing enough to prevent that.
Standard price-gouging and auction problem. Same reason Taylor Swift doesn’t raise her prices or auction tickets off, but blames her shabbos goy instead.
There’s also a question of what does ‘running out of toilet paper’ mean? Back in Covid Round One, there wasn’t a real toilet paper shortage. I didn’t see a single empty shelf of toilet paper. (I did, however, see a giant pyramid of toilet paper rolls at Costco stacked on a pallet/forklift thingy, serving as a reminder that “every shortage is followed by a glut”, but the glut never gets reported.) Maybe it happened in my town in between my visits or in another store, maybe it didn’t, but if I didn’t read social media, I would have no idea there was supposed to be any such thing. Millions of people were not being forced for months to relieve themselves in an open field like they were in India… When people say ‘America ran out of toilet paper’, what they really mean is, ‘I saw a lot of photos on social media of empty shelves and people talking about how late capitalism has failed’ (and at this point, even if they claim to have had toilet paper problems themselves, we know from retrospective memory studies like of 9/11 that a lot of them didn’t). There’s no obvious way for everyone who sells toilet paper to ensure that there is never an empty shelf anywhere ever which would yield a photo to go viral. (Especially not these days when people will just fake the photo with GPT-4o.) And that wouldn’t be economically viable to begin with: stockouts are normal, healthy, and good, because the level of stock which it would take to ensure 0% stockouts would be exorbitantly expensive. To the extent that an empty shelf becomes a political weapon to poison peoples’ minds, it’s a negative externality to whoever owns and operates that shelf. So that is no reason for them to raise the price of toilet paper enough to ensure it never happened.
(Another point to make would be that people can easily endure any brief fluctuations in toilet paper supply. It’s easy to economize on it and there are usually a lot of rolls in any household and lots of mediocre substitutes of the sort that were used before ‘toilet paper’ as a specialized category became the norm—like newspapers. There’s also paper towel rolls. If it were some big deal, then after the supposed horrible disaster of shortages during COVID, everyone would’ve immediately gone out and bought bidets as the most effective permanent method to insulate yourself from future shortages. But they didn’t.)
I don’t recall toilet paper specifically, but I definitely saw lots of empty shelves at the start of covid (in the UK).
In that case, as a communism survivor, I agree that there definitely was no toilet paper shortage.
Newspapers? What is this, 20th century? Try using a smartphone. :D
But yes, paper towel rolls. (I don’t remember whether such thing existed during communism.)