Thousand Sheet Roll
A strange kind of reminiscence this one, back to the days when the local supermarket (in Sydney) stocked a brand of toilet paper called Thousand Sheet Roll.
I was living by myself at the time. I would install one of these, and wouldn’t have to worry about changing the roll for months and months at a time. The roll started to seem like a fixture rather than a consumable. It was only single-ply paper, but it was decently strong and perfectly functional.
Even the ordinary rolls of the time (early 1980’s) held 500 sheets.
But then the manufacturers realised that most people instinctively buy toilet paper “by the roll”, not “by the sheet”. So they reduced the rolls to 400 sheets at first, then to as low as 180 sheets (although 220 seems to be pretty common nowadays).
The manufacturers ran ads claiming that their paper was softer than ever. Always, the ad showed someone squeezing the roll. Well that doesn’t illustrate anything except how loosely the roll has been wound. If you wind the roll with lots of air, the roll as a whole appears more squeezable even though the paper is the same.
The manufacturers aren’t stupid. Why put 500 sheets on a roll if people are just as happy to buy rolls of 220 sheets (and to buy more than twice as many of those rolls)?
So now, the multi-pack rules. Four, six, eight, twelve rolls at once, with all the extra shelf space costs, transport costs and extra cardboard cores that this implies.
Oh for the old days when life was simple, and Thousand Sheet Roll ruled the little room.