Imagine you’re an engineer who designs toilet paper. While all your buddies from engineering school are designing bridges, driverless cars and artificial kidneys, your drawing board is covered with an endless succession of sketches of identical quilted and perforated sheets that are destined to intersect with your customers’ most intimate anatomy.
One day, the guys from Marketing burst into your office. “Bigger!” they shout. “Can you make it bigger?”
“Bigger what?” you respond. “Bigger sheet size? Bigger perforations between the sheets? Bigger quilting patterns?”
“No. Bigger rolls. The same thing you’ve been doing, just make the rolls bigger in diameter.”
You excitedly pull a pencil from behind your ear and start making some rough calculations. Then a question comes to you.
“Why?” you ask the guys from Marketing. “Why do you want bigger rolls? Why would anyone?”
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That’s a very good question. It’s one Cei Richardson has been asking. The retired journalist is among those caught up in a veritable arms race in the world of toilet paper roll size.
Richardson, 77, lives in an older house in Falls Church. It’s the sort of house where the bathrooms have built-in toilet paper niches. These are ceramic, with a spring-tension spindle, and are plumbed into the tiled walls. I have them in the bathrooms of my 80-year-old Silver Spring home.
Another feature of an old house is small closets, so Richardson doesn’t keep a lot of toilet paper on hand. No room. A couple of weeks ago, she went to the Giant in Falls Church to buy some toilet paper. When she got home, she realized the new TP was so wide — more than 5 inches across — that it wouldn’t fit in the holder.
Richardson drove around to other stores in search of “normal” sized toilet paper.
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“The checker at Harris Teeter was completely sympathetic to me,” Richardson said. “She said, ‘I don’t know how this industry is going to get away with this.’”
Apparently, the stock of regular toilet paper had been exhausted, replaced by only the bigger stuff.
Said Richardson: “I don’t know if I want to have any truck with this industry anymore.”
And who can blame her? The toilet paper industrial complex has needlessly complicated that most basic of staples. And by fattening the rolls, it’s caused a cascade of other issues.
For starters, the big rolls don’t fit in old houses.
“What are we going to do?” Richardson said. “Get a mason in to carve out a new holder?”
Well, you could buy a toilet paper roll extender. This is a little contraption that replaces your old spindle so you can hang bigger rolls.
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Another problem: The big rolls don’t fit in the storage canisters many people keep commode-side. Well, they do fit — if you shove them in the way an artillery officer shoves a ball down the throat of a cannon, deforming the outer layer of paper.
Supersizing toilet paper is like changing the headphone port or battery charging cables on an iPhone: annoying.
“I can’t understand,” Richardson said. “The industry was just chugging along fine. It must be the profit motive. It’s what runs all of these industries. I’d love to get hold of the decision-maker.”
So would I. I contacted Procter & Gamble — the makers of Charmin — and Kimberly-Clark, which makes Cottonelle. I also reached out to Albertsons, makers of a brand called Open Nature.
No one from the toilet paper industrial complex bothered to get back to me. What are they hiding?
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I think they welcome confusion. Six years ago, Jamesetta M. Walker, a writer for the Virginian-Pilot, compared toilet paper brands and found a dizzying variety of sizes, including double, double-plus, giant, big, “Big Squeeze,” “Mega” and “Mega Plus.”
Changes in the size and number of sheets make it difficult for consumers to compare one product to another.
Charmin now comes in Super Mega, too. And last year, the company made news with the introduction of its Forever roll. It’s 12 inches across and — depending on your mileage — can go a couple of months without needing to be changed. It’s sold with its own stand, which has a weighted base, lest the roll topple over and break your metatarsal.
Why would bigger be better? The toilet paper companies say a larger roll is more convenient for users. I think it’s something else.
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Researchers have found that when faced with larger portion sizes, people consume more food. I think something similar is going on with toilet paper. When you see a gargantuan roll, you’re filled with a sense of plenty. You spin that sucker a little longer. You take a few more sheets.
Bottom line: It all adds up.
Richardson said she’s contemplating heading into rural areas — “little towns around the Blue Ridge Mountains, over in the Shenandoah Valley” — where country stores may still have vintage toilet paper in stock.
“Every day that goes by, more people are figuring out they are getting snookered,” she said.
And who suffers? Us end-users.
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.
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