They’ve started again, haven’t they? Those people who clear the shop shelves of toilet paper at the first breath of covid resurgence. It brings a whole new meaning to calling someone an arsehole. They must be arseholes – huge, gargantuan ones with little else to make up their physical structure – to need such vast quantities of the stuff.
I have done some maths. Andrex Classic Clean 12 roll multipack – £6.95. (And yes, I must have Andrex.) To buy enough to last me until Christmas, in case there’s a run on it (forgive the pun), I reckon on a roll a day at current rates of consumption in our household of four. Give or take. That means 91 rolls or 8 multipacks (with a few sheets left over for the week between Christmas and New Year), which is an investment of £55.60. (Who says Christmas is cancelled when you’ve got that bulk of paper under your Christmas tree, eh?) If I buy them at Waitrose, it will save me 10p per pack. (But, as you will see below, the people who are genuinely doing this do not need to clip coupons.) If I buy them at Tesco online, oh, too late. They have sold out, according to the website just now. (Are Tesco customers more likely to panic buy?)
A roll is 200 sheets, about 302 feet. That means that 17 and a half rolls make a mile. My 91 rolls would run to a tad over 5 miles. Five miles of wiping. At a consumption rate of £11.12 per mile. That mileage shames even a 3.7 litre SUV Hummer which comes in at 27.2p per mile – about 41 times cheaper. (But a Hummer might be a bit big, unwieldy and tough for this job.) So to stockpile that amount of Andrex at that price per mile, well, it would be cheaper to use dollar bills when I pay a visit. No one could possibly afford that ruinous fuel economy. By way of comparison, I could buy a very nice secondhand 2003 28 metre Sunseeker yacht and get about £15.60 per mile out of it. I must be loaded. Like I said, these types clearly don’t nickel and dime about such paltry sums. Nor worry about their carbon footprint.
So what can we conclude from this piece of entirely legitimate mathematics? We can conclude that all loo roll hoarders are not only big arseholes – in fact, mainly made up of arsehole – they must also be extraordinarily rich. In the super yacht class of rich. And they must also live in big houses – big enough to store 20kg of toilet tissue without having to navigate over it in the hall every time you want to leave the building. What I can’t work out, though, is how they get eight 12 multipacks in to the tiny boot of their Lambourghinis. Or why we aren’t spotting them as they monopolise the ‘Shoppers with children’ parking spaces. Or why they are shopping at Tesco. Maybe they need the Club Card points for their peeled grapes (the hemorrhoids variety, I’m hoping).
Whoever you are, panic buying loo roll and other stuff: just stop it.