Is This You?
Shrinking Toilet Paper
Life happens and things change. We all know that. In recent years, COVID-19 changed the way we did a lot of things. Things that affected our pocketbooks and wallets. Not just our personal monies, but monies of big businesses too. But!
Yes, a quietly shrinking “but.” Here’s my tale of tail woe! Oh My Goodness.
My other half and I owned a hardware store that we sold in the early 2000s. Because I could, I ordered a bunch of what you might call “back stock” that I would have as I went through the withdrawals of not having a store of my own. Some of the things I ordered were cases of paper products. Kleenex, the ones that were three layers and soft as a kitten. Paper towels, of course, and much-needed toilet paper. That was some 20 years ago, and I admit I still have some of my “exit order” stored. But I am coming down to the end of the last case of TP. Knowing that, I decided to buy just a little extra cushion (pun intended) of toilet paper for my stockroom.
Before putting the new stuff out with the old stuff, I grabbed a few rolls to put in the closet with what was standing guard. Waiting to be unrolled when needed. That’s when I saw IT!
I wear glasses, and sometimes my eyes play tricks on me. Like the mirror on the passenger side of our vehicles where there is a sticker that reads, “some things may look smaller ...” Well, my new rolls looked smaller than my older rolls. I thought, “No way. It’s toilet paper.” I will admit I was sitting down when I noticed this deviation. Eventually, I grabbed the two side-by-side rolls, and yes, the new ones were smaller. Just the width. The package still touted the 1,000 sheets and the strength and blah, blah, blah. But the width! The width was narrower. This is just wrong on sooooo many levels.
To make sure I wasn’t imagining this change, I did something you will really get a giggle out of. I have a roll of toilet paper that I got when I got married in 1976! Yes, it’s 50 years old — and it’s pink. It was stuffed up inside one of those crochet toilet paper covers that a lady made for a wedding gift. I don’t have the crochet cover, but I do have the roll of toilet paper. It was a full 3/8 of an inch taller!
I remember when I noticed that my paper towels changed. Oh, yes, they did! The size of each towel was smaller, and the number of square inches changed by a number that you would only have noticed if you had a hand that weighed nails by the pound by taking them out of a nail bin for customers for years. I have that hand. (I introduced myself to the president of a BofA from Las Vegas when he bought a ranch in our area by measuring his nails with my weight-conscious hand — such another story.)
When I bought the “new” paper towels as my “back stock” was about to run out, I noticed in the grocery store the difference in the weight. So to find my toilet paper was also given a shave down made me madder than a wet hen!
I was quiet when the iced tea company I bought my tea from went from a full 2 quarts and downsized the amount to something akin to a quart now measured in those danged metric measurements — and raised the price too! Price is not the issue. Prices increase. But to increase the price and decrease the amount too? Quietly with subversiveness? And to the most sensitive and much-needed items of life. Ha-ha!
There are so many things in the world to get our hair in the air about. Is toilet paper one of those things? I say maybe, because in our world we need to stop and realize the phrase popularized by author and psychotherapist Richard Carlson, who used it as the title of his massive 1997 bestselling self-help book, “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff ... and It’s All Small Stuff,” is true. Not any truer today than it was when paper grocery bags became plastic. Soon we began to tie them closed. Then we all became frustrated and lost fingernail after fingernail trying to get them untied!
Yes, there will always be something to wag a finger at. Pull hair out about. Squish our faces up at. Learn the decisions made in boardrooms to keep companies in the black so we can always have toilet paper. Because just think what the world would be like if toilet paper went away altogether.
Really!
Comment
Comments