Why Is the Toilet Paper in Public Restrooms Shrinking?

I’ve noticed that the toilet paper in public places is now only about 3 inches wide. When did this start, and what’s the reason? It barely does the job anymore. —Short

In 1974, a standard roll of Charmin contained 650 4.5-inch sheets, and if fully unrolled would have measured 243 feet. Today, a standard roll (if you can find one) contains just 56 3.92-inch sheets, for a total length of roughly 19 feet. Extrapolating from this rate of change, we can calculate that by 2074 a standard roll will contain four 3-inch sheets for a total length of 1 foot, while the rolls in 1874 apparently ran to 110,000 sheets and stretched almost 10½ miles, making each long enough to TP the Great Pyramids by itself. Numbers don’t lie!

In any case, Short, what’s happening with your ever-dwindling bog rolls is a classic case of shrinkflation: Rather than hit consumers with a price hike, companies hold the retail price steady while giving you less of the product and hope you won’t notice.

In the case of toilet tissue, producers also try to hide the ball by playing games with the size of the package—if you feel like you haven’t seen one of those 56-sheet standard rolls mentioned above, it’s because they’ve largely been replaced by “double,” “mega” or “jumbo” size rolls. A 224-sheet mega-roll might boast that it’s equal to four standard rolls, conveniently ignoring the fact that 20 years ago a standard roll itself would have had about 224 sheets.

Meanwhile—as you’ve noticed—the sheets themselves have been shrinking as well. Residential tissue used to be 4.5 inches wide; today most brands are down to 3.9 inches. Commercial rolls—the ones you find in stores and restaurants—are even worse, some as narrow as 3.3 inches. The motivation for these shrinking sheets is the same as it is for shrinking rolls: getting more units of product (and profit) out of the same amount of raw materials.

Several bills designed to combat this “deceptive downsizing” have been introduced in Congress in the past few years (including one from local-girl-made-good Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez) but don’t hold your breath waiting for them to clear the GOP-controlled House and Senate. For now, all we can really do is grit our teeth, use a couple of extra turns of our ever-diminishing bum wad, and brace ourselves for the inevitable smug comments from bidet owners.

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.