COVID Panic over Cushy Tushy Paper

"Found some toilet paper in the wild! Driving it home now."
"This is as close as I'll ever come to knowing what it feels like driving one of those armoured money trucks."
A bit of Twitter fun from @TransForYang

Rolling, rolling, rolling: A Procter & Gamble manufacturing facility. David Salpeter

Things have been so tense in North America with wild panic setting in over the possibility of consumers unable to access toilet paper that the Twitterer might even have experienced how nasty it can be when an armoured truck is held up, its driver held at attention with the barrel of a revolver held to his head while a voice emanating from a face mask snaps at  him, report this to the authorities and I'll neutralize you, while making off with his cushy tushy paper.

Supermarkets in North America and no doubt elsewhere sported shelves empty of cleaning products, refrigerated units void of meat, shortages of eggs, but it was the sight of empty shelves where shoppers knew toilet paper should be stacked that really set civilization aflame. Consumers of toilet paper had a mission: find out where the toilet paper is being shipped to, get there first, and grab it -- all of it -- before anyone else can get their greasy hands on it!

Hmm, toilet paper. Those big double, soft, three-ply, embossed stacked rolls take up a whole lot of room. So supermarkets, unwilling to take up precious stock room with it, order and shelve only what is estimated to sell during a certain period of time. How would they know there'd be a run on toilet paper? It's as though people had become so irritably nervous over the very thought of the threat hanging over the world at a time of SARS-CoV-2, their bowels continually ran.

Meticulously cleaning up the ensuring - er - mess, takes lots, scads of toilet paper. Evidently. Consumer products data tracker NCSolutions issued updates on the pathetic lack of toilet paper and data for re-stocking shelves. 73 percent of U.S.grocery stores came up perilously slack on re-stocking sending consumers into a blizzard of failing confidence in the market. One mightn't think that a 27 percent increase in demand over the same period a year earlier would produce such terror.

Consisting on average of 2.6 people, U.S. households use roughly 409 rolls annually. This, according to the producer of Angel Soft and Quilted Northern, Georgia Pacific. Remaining home 24/7 under lockdown would boost that average usage by 40 percent -- imagine! Increasing the need to purchase said rolls to the rate of 9 doubles in about two weeks.

Toilet paper was in the exalted company of other shortage items such as pasta, soap, flour, yeast and canned goods, all of which swiftly vacated store shelves and became unavailable to other citizens equally entitled to share the riches of civilized living but hadn't had the speedy wit to begin stockpiling as their more savvy-selfish neighbours had.

It's a clear bet that Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark and Georgia Pacific never in their wildest industrial dreams imagined that they might ever represent the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in popular appeal during a global pandemic.

A shelf at a Kroger-owned Ralphs store is stocked with toilet paper in Los Angeles, California, U.S., April 25, 2020. Picture taken April 25, 2020. REUTERS/Lisa Baertlein