How Big Toilet Paper dupes us all

It’s a truism that everything’s bigger in America — just look at the cars and houses. But perhaps nowhere is the virtue of bigger is better more bizarrely apparent than how toilet paper is sold. Wander into the bathroom products aisle at the supermarket and you’ve entered a topsy-turvy world where numbers shape-shift. A pack of 18 mega toilet paper rolls, for example, magically transforms into 90 “regular” ones. The labeling emphasizes this greater number in large font, lest you foolishly think 18 simply equals 18. Another pack might insist that 12 even-thicker rolls of toilet paper are the equivalent of 96 normal rolls.

The advertising is clear: You’re getting a lot of toilet paper. That should be good news, since if there’s one rule of thumb everyone should live by, it’s never run out of TP. We saw anxiety around this eventuality reach new heights in the early days of the pandemic, when crowds of people fought to snap up as much toilet paper as they could, leading to a shortage and extreme price gouging. Americans’ enormous vehicles and palatial abodes may in fact exist in service of conveying and storing gigantic bulk packs of this bathroom essential.

There’s some irony, then, that for all the trumpeting of gargantuan sizes, toilet paper rolls are generally getting smaller. It’s a key example of the trend of manufacturers charging the same price (or even slightly more) for less product that’s been dubbed “shrinkflation.” It makes it more difficult than ever to figure out if you’re getting ripped off. None of the three major toilet paper manufacturers Vox reached out to responded to a request for comment.

“I really can’t think of any other category that’s as confusing as toilet paper,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at the consulting firm GlobalData. With dubious numerical claims about how much a “mega” roll is really worth, brands can promote the perception of value without actually having to show their work. Figuring out the price per toilet paper sheet is a hassle, but it would show how much more expensive the product has become.

“The consumer wouldn’t like that, so they all keep it a bit opaque,” Saunders says.

The most glaring issue plaguing the toilet paper industry is a lack of standardization. Double, triple, and mega rolls are imprecise descriptors that vary by brand; they are not measurement units. In fine print, toilet paper packaging will often admit that these sizes are relative to the “regular” roll — sometimes they mean their own brand’s regular size, but other times, it’s against a competitor’s one-ply regular.

Unsurprisingly, the so-called standard size has no consistency, either. Charmin’s regular roll has 55 two-ply sheets, for example, but it’s often hard to even find the regular size of a brand’s toilet paper in stores. The mega roll is often advertised as having four times as many sheets as the mythical “regular” it’s being compared to, which means that Cottonelle’s idea of a regular roll contains 61 sheets, Quilted Northern’s an awkward 73.75 sheets, and Angel Soft’s 80 sheets. But even these are perplexing figures since many real-life standard toilet paper rolls contain more than 100 sheets.

The sheets-per-roll ratio is also subject to change depending on whether you’re looking at single-ply, two-ply, or three-ply. (Not to make your brain hurt more, but sheet dimensions vary too.) The mega roll is just one size out of many that brands offer, all with slightly different naming conventions. Cottonelle sells mega, family mega, or super mega, while Charmin now offers the mega-XXL and even the “forever roll,” which is so big you need a standalone holder. There appears to be no limit to the jumbofication of toilet paper jargon.

All this renders comparison shopping far more challenging than it is for the average household product. Making matters worse, there’s no single consistent method of unit pricing for toilet paper. Some retailers, like Walmart, Amazon, and Target, show the price per 100 sheets, but then you still have to factor in the variation in sheets per roll for each brand. Walgreens shows price per sheet, while Home Depot displays a pretty unhelpful price per roll. Irregular unit price labeling is a problem for many consumer products, according to Chuck Bell, programs director of advocacy at Consumer Reports. Unit pricing is “only mandated directly in nine states,” Bell says, while 10 others have voluntarily taken it up. “It’s hard to compare products online for value for money.”

It’s no wonder people have taken matters into their own hands. In late 2018, a California man named Victor Ly launched a “Toilet Paper Value Calculator” that crunches the number of rolls, sheets per roll, and any discounts that apply. Ly told Wirecutter in 2022 that a good deal was probably around 0.253 cents per sheet. While there’s no longer a toilet paper shortage or people panic-buying pallets of them — though the impulse to do so lingers — it’s a much more expensive commodity today than before the pandemic, especially now that we’re a few years out from a period of high inflation. A report from consumer watchdog Public Interest Research Group noted that, before the pandemic, a pack of 36 Charmin Ultra Soft rolls cost $30.95 on Amazon. At time of writing, the same pack costs $59 on the site. (In December 2020, it was selling for as high as $114.99.)

Most name-brand toilet paper today far exceeds Ly’s price threshold. A 30-pack of Charmin Ultra Strong mega rolls breaks down to 0.5 cents per sheet, though a 36-pack of Scott 1000 toilet paper is about 0.083 cents per sheet. Kirkland’s 30-pack of toilet paper, selling for $23.49 at time of writing, works out to 0.206 cents per sheet.

The cost of making toilet paper may have gone up in recent years, according to the Los Angeles Times, due to a slowdown in lumber production (there’s less available wood pulp, which is what most toilet paper is made of). Combine that with the fact that, as journalist Will Oremus reported in a piece about the pandemic toilet paper shortage, more people are working remotely today, reducing the time spent in office bathrooms. It means that the average consumer is using more toilet paper at home, cringing at how much their budget for bathroom products has gone up.

Toilet paper manufacturers have come up with a way to keep prices roughly the same, though — at least at a quick glance. The same pack of toilet paper you buy every month might only be more expensive upon close scrutiny of the fine print, when you realize each roll is made up of fewer sheets. A recent analysis by loan marketplace LendingTree showed that toilet paper was among the top offenders among products whose size or volume had shrunk since 2019 or 2020. A pack of 12 mega rolls from Angel Soft went from 429 sheets per roll to 320 — essentially shrinking by a quarter — but at least the price went down by 15 percent too. Charmin Ultra Strong mega rolls, on the other hand, shrank by 15 percent while the price increased by 11 percent.

This isn’t a new strategy that only toilet paper makers are employing. People have been complaining about product shrinkage for years; a Consumer Reports article from 2015 compared toilet paper rolls from top brands, showing that some had reduced by over 20 percent. The reason, manufacturers claimed at the time, was that better paper quality meant that people could use less of it.

Edgar Dworsky, a former consumer protection lawyer, has been tracking this shady practice — which he calls “downsizing” — for decades on his websites, MousePrint.org and ConsumerWorld.org.

“I remember back in the 1960s when my Mounds candy bar used to be two ounces and became one point something or other,” he tells Vox. He notes that old Charmin toilet paper had as many as 650 sheets in a single-ply roll; its mega-XXL today has just 440 sheets. An older Charmin regular roll had 82 sheets versus just 55 today. The playbook is to shrink the current roll size, then invent a new tier (with a more ridiculous name) that can be priced higher.

Consumer brands “are in the business of making you think you’re getting more,” Dworsky says. “It’s all a name game, it’s all a numbers game, and if you’re just oblivious to it, you’re going to get snookered.”

Toilet paper is marketed both as a value product, where you’re getting four rolls for the price of one, and a weirdly indulgent luxury at the same time. It’s something meant to be quickly disposed of, literally flushed away, yet commercials for toilet paper are almost always focusing on its delightful, cushiony softness or a special “quilted” or “diamond weave” texture that adds a premium feel to the product. There’s scented toilet paper, and even toilet paper with colorful patterns. One of Quilted Northern’s April Fool’s Day ads pokes fun at the excessive promotional style of its own industry, proclaiming a “return” to hand-crafted, artisanal toilet paper.

Ultimately, this is because we spend so much time with it, and in such an intimate way, so such bells and whistles do matter to some of us. “There’s obviously some people [who], for medical reasons, like to have really soft toilet paper,” Saunders says. “Some people just like extra strong toilet paper.” For others, it’s a pure bang-for-buck play, where they might just gravitate toward the pack with the most rolls (which isn’t necessarily the best value).

The range of options, from one-ply sparseness to lilac-scented plushness, isn’t the problem. It’s that it’s so hard to disentangle the value you’re actually getting. As Dworsky notes, consumers could bring a scale to weigh packs of toilet paper every time they go to the store, but then what can you do about it? You still have to buy one of the #ShrinkFlated options, and it’s not an area where we’re spoiled for choice. While there are plenty of different versions that a single brand offers, just three manufacturers — Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, and Georgia-Pacific — make up some 80 percent of the bathroom tissue market.

One could switch to commercial-grade toilet paper, which is much cheaper but is of (ahem) crappier quality. Where consumer toilet paper is soft, perhaps infused with lotion, often embossed with a delightful little pattern, the stuff we see in public restrooms is stiff and so thin that it breaks apart if you so much as look at it. Still, a 12-pack of commercial toilet paper at Home Depot is about $34 at time of writing, and one roll is about 700 feet long. Assuming that a square of consumer-grade toilet paper is about 4 inches long, a 440-sheet Charmin mega-XXL roll would still be under 147 feet.

Lawmakers and President Joe Biden have wagged their fingers at corporations for shrinkflation and have even introduced a bill attempting to ban the practice, though neither Dworsky nor Bell thinks it’s likely to become law. But more transparency around product sizes, more consistent unit price labels, or even requiring a consumer notice when there’s a change in size would go a long way to help shoppers. Last year, in the lead-up to price negotiations with suppliers, French grocery chain Carrefour started attaching labels next to packaged foods and drinks that had gotten smaller.

What’s certain is that the deceptive, confusing accounting of toilet paper rolls shouldn’t be the norm — and, in fact, it appears to be mostly a North American tradition. While other countries do also sell “mega” rolls, there’s no fiddly math on the packaging insisting that a dozen rolls are somehow more than that. Toilet paper is no small matter, especially for Americans. Per capita, the US is the No. 1 consumer of it in the world, each American using about 141 rolls per year as of 2018. A Consumer Reports buying guide once compared the annual usage to the length of 23 football fields.

One way to avoid the frustrating morass of counting rolls and sheets is to opt out of the game altogether. “I switched to a bidet 10 years ago,” Dworsky says.