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| Economy |
| What Everyone's Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage |
| 2020-04-04 |
| Bottom line: [Marker] If you’re looking for where all the toilet paper went, forget about people’s attics or hall closets. Think instead of all the toilet paper that normally goes to the commercial market ‐ those office buildings, college campuses, Starbucks, and airports that are now either mostly empty or closed. That’s the toilet paper that’s suddenly going unused. So why can’t we just send that toilet paper to Safeway or CVS? That’s where supply chains and distribution channels come in. Not only is it not the same product, but it often doesn’t come from the same mills. 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. It comes in huge rolls, too big to fit on most home dispensers. The paper itself is thinner and more utilitarian. It comes individually wrapped and is shipped on huge pallets, rather than in brightly branded packs of six or 12. "Not only is it not the same product, but it often doesn’t come from the same mills," added Jim Luke, a professor of economics at Lansing Community College, who once worked as head of planning for a wholesale paper distributor. "So for instance, Procter & Gamble [which owns Charmin] is huge in the retail consumer market. But it doesn’t play in the institutional market at all." |
| Posted by:Abu Uluque |
| #2 Ooops. I missed one of the more key sentences when I was copying and pasting from the whole article: With some 75% of the U.S. population under stay-at-home orders, Americans are no longer using the restrooms at their workplace, in schools, at restaurants, at hotels, or in airports. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2020-04-04 14:37 |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Anomalous Sources 2020-04-04 12:38 |