To think this is a ridiculous amount of toilet rolls weekly???

[Gemma273]

With the price increases of generally everything it's bugging the life out me even more than it did previously. I've always said my household use far too many per week but surely 9 per week is excessive. We are a family of 3, DC, husband and myself. It's definitely not my DC using excessive amounts or putting some down the toilet etc because DC likes an audience when doing the toilet and likes reassurance she is wiping correctly.

Are you buying cheap loo roll?

I recently bought 18 rolls of Aldis, I'm usually an Andrew girl, but you trying to save money.

By gosh it's thinner than fag paper, we're using a tonne of it, just for a regular shite.

The expensive stuff used to last us so much longer.

Another tip, switch to Izal Medicated or Bronco. The hard, crackly stuff that you can also use as tracing paper. 👍

Experience tells me one uses the absolute minimum one can get away with. 😱

We are a family of five and use just over 1 a day. Have switched to the Tesco double rolls to save a bit of money, not as nice as other ones but they do last longer.

Why are people assuming a) that anyone is trying to save money on it b) that they are trying to be competitive about it c) they don't clean their bum properly!

Maybe its simply more of a case that some people eat more and therefore shit more. And some people use bog roll more efficiently and effectively without much effort rather needing to use a whole tree. And perhaps some people just don't eat it.

I've done an (totally unscientific) in house test, and frankly andrex ain't what it used to be.
I tried all the kinds of paper morrisons and tesco stocked, and of course costcos own brand.
I have never tried to ration the stuff, so I simply put out a 4 pack and timed how long it lasted.
This was pre pandemic so things might have changed.
The really cheap stuff is bloody awful and we easily went through it in less than two days.
Next up shops own brand, 4 pack lasted two days
Next up andrex and similar, lasted three days and then finally Costco, lasted 4 days.
I used to swear by andrex, I'm sure a roll used to last 3 or 4 days when my kids were little. Sadly no more

Or maybe most people don't actually care enough to post on social media about it....

And just because you use 'a lot', it doesn't mean that you eat it FFS. Lots of people have bowel issues.

I have no idea how many we go through a week (2 adults and 1 toilet trained child) but we get a box of 48 delivered every three months and we only go through about 30 of them. I do use toilet paper instead of kitchen roll to wipe up spills as never buy kitchen roll. I also have a two year old who likes to use toilet roll to wrap his baby sister in

Andrex definitely have less on them. I bought a Morrisons value pack last week; it was terrible; the actual hole in the role was mahoosive, and paper was thin.
I do think it's annoying how much it all costs now.

Many years ago when I was a student I shared a house with three other girls. We were trying to keep household costs down so attention turned to how much loo roll we used and we came up with some amount that we considered reasonable, say 14 sheets each a day.

Then as a reminder we put a chart on the bathroom wall with a row each and a column for each day and you had to fill it in on each visit. Obviously based on an honesty system. The idea was if you went over your weekly allocation you had to buy a new roll from your own money rather than the kitty.

However this turned out to be counterproductive because of visitor activity. There was a row for miscellaneous guests but regular visitors got a row of their own. One of the girls was seeing two fellows at the same time (they knew about each other) and they would compete to have at least one large number of sheets per visit - presumably to demonstrate that they had stayed long enough to need a significant movement.

I realise this will be terribly outing if one of the other three ladies is on mumsnet. Well unless this turns out to be a common solution to the problem.

I only recently realised that the men in our family (and it’s definitely the men) seem to have a weird antipathy to using the last sheets on a toilet roll.

So they’ll take an almost-done roll off the holder and replace it with a brand new one, but instead of then finishing the old roll, they just balance it on top of the new one and leave it there for someone else to use.

Or just sort of stand it on the windowsill or other random place and leave it there, unfinished. Or - even worse - just chuck it in the bin. Last week I emptied out about 8 with loads of paper still on, enough virtually to make another roll! Can someone please explain WTAF this is all about?! Because DS & DH just kind of shrug and act like it’s normal.

I have mild IBS and drink a lot of water, and can easily go through one roll a day. I think 9 rolls lasting a family for a month is bloody weird.

I think The excel nerd above needs to do a month study on scrunchers versus layerers. My hypothesis is that first, those who use most will all be scrunchers, and second, that men are more likely to scrunch and also make far bigger scrunches than women scrunchers. This also explains why men don't use the last few sheets on a roll because, to a man, three sheets doesn't make a scrunch hence the role has insufficient sheets for his need hence it's useless.

I live alone and a pack of 9 lasts me for months. I layer parsimoniously.

😂😂😂

If you eat a high fibre diet like us, the paper is clean straight away.

I said 9 rolls a week earlier but actually that's not true. It's probably 7 rolls, because we buy a 9 pack every 8 days or so and there's always 2 left.

It gets used for more than just wiping bums!

Is bog roll high in fibre content if you eat it?

Yes I think there is a lot to be said for optimium technique (interesting theory about scrunchers). I do agree that if you were to get tracing paper it would develop technique fast. Maybe there is also a generational thing as part of this too due to the affects of what toliet paper you were exposed to in your formative years whilst still learning technique.

Are you sure they're not misguidedly thinking they're doing a good thing by not leaving it to the next person the change the roll?

Same here. Household of 2 buy the Charmin packs of 32 and replace when needed.
Though have 2 packs in waiting atm as Sainsburys are charging 13.50 and Tesco where I usually buy them are charging 14.90. used to be 10.50 in Tesco's

Interestingly, many moons ago I used to work for one of the biggest toilet roll manufacturers in the world.

They still manufacture many of the own-label ones for supermarkets, as well as their own premium and budget brands, plus the away-from-home products (for hotels, restaurants, hospitals, etc.)

What I think people might find interesting is that it cost us more to make some of the lower quality products than the premium ones. We added a bit of dye to make the paper greyer, plus a few other things to make it less premium.

(There's a very good reason for purposely lowering the quality of the budget stuff, before anyone jumps on me to say it's nonsense or ridiculous.)

We buy boxes of 48 bamboo double length loo rolls from Who Gives A Crap. I've just checked my Shop app and we had a box delivered in January and another one earlier this month. The first box isn't finished yet though. There are 2 adults during term time plus a 15 year old throughout the holidays (about 20 weeks of the year) and every 3rd weekend.

We used to have a family friend who was a sales rep. In his early days he used to dream of being able to supply a major player such as M & S.

In later years he became involved in toilet roll production, importing the paper to the factory where it was dyed and put in to rolls. He then made the sales. At this time M & S were attempting to had more household things to their range. They wanted to see own brand bog roll but it would have to be a particular distinctive shade that nobody else used. As this was a new line they wouldn't commit to a large order. Friend had the intense satisfaction of being able to turn M&S down as their order wasn't big enough to make it worthwhile

@5foot5

Yes, I can quite believe it!

There's not a vast amount to be made from individual toilet rolls - it's all about huge volume. We manufactured our own paper from pulp and water, etc. but we still didn't make a big margin. I was actually based at one of the sites in Finland near the border with Russia that made the pulp, for a time. It was incredible to see the number of trees being processed for cellulose each day (sustainably, I might add, with the company growing more trees that we used).

The volume of water - even though it's carefully recycled - the energy required and the size of the equipment needed to make the final rolls we take for granted and then flush away is mind boggling...

There's a very good reason for purposely lowering the quality of the budget stuff, before anyone jumps on me to say it's nonsense or ridiculous.

I'm curious now @SofiaSoFar 😁
What's the reason?

Its honestly not that interesting! 😁

It's because there are 2 different markets and they need to be kept as 2 markets in order to maximise overall profit.

I'll start by saying that I didn't work for the manufacturer of Andrex, but I'll use that brand as it's so well known, and I'll simplify to ignore retail margins, etc.

Manufacturer makes massive volumes of Andrex brand and sells them at 50p per roll. Because they're such large volumes, they're turned out at 25p per roll (total cost of goods sold - COGS).

Manufacturer also makes Value brand toilet rolls which they sell at 35p per roll. Because they don't make anywhere near as many, the lower quality raw materials aren't cheaper and, when you factor in extra change-overs to run them, the COGS is now up to 26p with a lower quality end product.

Alternatively you could just use the same materials and only change the wrap, so they'd cost still cost to make. But then you'd effectively be selling Andrex at Value prices and once consumers got wind of that, you'd soon be selling all your volume at 10p margin, not 25p margin.

Instead, you could use the same higher quality materials to save on changeovers and just add a bit of black dye to grey the paper slightly, use thinner walled cores and worse perforating blades so the rolls squash and the sheets don't separate as well, (but this can add a bit of cost too in changing over and more different materials stocked.)

Its all about protecting your premium market while still making some (but less) money selling to the value market too.

The same thing happens with cars, for example, where you can pay a lot more for a particular model when a lower one just has some electronic features disabled and some fancy wheels that really only cost a few £ more. If they switched all the features on, no one would buy the higher model and so profits would be lower.

Thank you very much @SofiaSoFar.
I understand it now.