Hoarding Toilet Paper

Evidently, the local stores are out of toilet paper…again.  There is not really a shortage, but we have a panic.  Despite the fact that the vast majority of toilet paper used in the United States is made domestically, the port strikes brought up fears of a supply line disruption which caused people to begin panic buying.  Other shoppers, noticing the steadily decreasing supply, joined the stampede.  The strike is over…for now, but it may take a few days for the shelves to be full again.

To start with, I’ll confess:  I have a three-month supply of toilet paper in the garage.  This is not something new, nor did I start hoarding because of Covid, I’ve bought such non-perishable commodities in bulk and kept a large supply on hand ever since I lived on Galveston Island and kept the house stocked for potential hurricanes.  I still keep candles in the freezer and have a couple of gallons of kerosene for the lanterns stowed away in the shed, too.

Come to think of it, each of the cars has an emergency roll of TP safely stored in a one-pound coffee can.  Since Folgers moved to an 11.5 ounce can a couple of decades ago, it might be time to change the rolls.  Does toilet paper go bad?

According to the people at Cottonelle, however, I’m running perilously low on TP.  Their research, independently confirmed by several other studies, shows that the average American uses between 130 and 150 rolls of wiping paper a year.  Some of the other data collected is interesting.  Women use a little more than five times as much toilet paper as men, and people in the South use 16 rolls a year more than people living in the West.  

Periodically, toilet paper is hard to find, and usually it’s for a good reason.  When I lived on Galveston, if a hurricane’s track in the Gulf showed there was a significant chance of the storm landing near the island, days before the storm hit, people flocked to the stores and bought up all the flashlight batteries, bottled water, Spam, and toilet paper available.  The shortages were only local, and everyone in Galveston knew that even after a bad storm, the stores would be stocked up again within a month or two.

Residents of the island expected this, and if you were smart, you bought such items in bulk during the spring, and if a storm didn’t hit, you slowly consumed the extra items over the fall and winter.  This was a regular cycle and everyone on the island expected it.  Just like we knew that you could pick up a good deal on a second-hand Honda generator—never used and still in the box—right around

And then, of course, there was The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020, due to Covid.  This was both a panic and a shortage.  While there is no doubt that some people began panic buying:  some stores were shut down and some factories shut down, so at least some of the shortage was real.  I suspect that the shortages of 2020 will always be on our minds every time there is a hint of a potential disruption of the supply line.  We’ll once more rush out and fill a grocery cart with crap we don’t really need.

The first panic I remember occurred back in 1973 and came from a surprising source:   there was a genuine gasoline shortage.  OPEC—particularly the Arab member countries—was angry over our support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War and had stopped exporting oil to us.  Gas prices shot up and there were shortages.  This in turn caused a devaluation of the dollar, resulting in foreign countries buying up large sums and amounts of American beef creating another shortage.  Faced with these very real shortages, consumers were already nervous.

In December of 1973, Congressman Harold Frolich was concerned about the paper industry in his district.  At a press conference, he announced that "The U.S. may face a shortage of toilet paper within a few months," adding that the only solution might be rationing.  This was all nonsense as there was no shortage, nor was the government even remotely considering rationing it.

This was a joke, whether Frolich intended it as such or not.  A week later during his monologue, Johnny Carson told his television audience "There is an acute shortage of toilet paper in the good old United States. We gotta quit writing on it!"

Carson had an audience of 20 million people and evidently every one of them rushed out the next day and started buying toilet paper.  The news spread and people across the nation started buying up toilet paper as fast as the stores could stock it.  Since Japan bought most of their paper products from the United States, the panic reached their country.  Japanese women stood in long lines for hours to buy small packets of paper.

After a few weeks, officials from the Scott Paper Company had several press conferences trying to reassure the nation that there was no shortage.  For the most part, these notices were ignored.

The problem, of course, was that people could see that there was a shortage, since there was no toilet paper on the shelves.  As fast as the factory could ship it, and as fast as the stores could put it on the shelves, people were grabbing it up.

CBS had Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, make an announcement on the evening news, “Unfounded rumors of a shortage has caused excessive demand at retail outlets.”  Several nights later, Johnny Carson told his audience, "For all my life in entertainment, I don't want to be remembered as the man who created a false toilet paper scare.  Apparently, there is no shortage!"

Perhaps these televised reassurances worked, or maybe people just observed that every week, more toilet paper was on the shelves, no matter how temporarily.  Or maybe everyone eventually just had enough toilet paper to last them for a while.  The panic was over.

Economists have studied why people willingly engage in such panics even though they suspect they aren’t real.  Our willingness to participate is rooted in something called “zero risk bias”.  When uncertainty threatens, people find comfort in taking action, even if they understand that the action does little to reduce the overall risk.  Effectively, we are saying that maybe we can’t control the big picture, at least we can wipe our ass.