Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel Bam Here. The good people who make toilet paper and get it onto the shelves of our local stores have been telling us for weeks that we have nothing to worry about. You'll have your sharmin, they say, you're quilted, Northern and angel softened. Fill in the store brand here will be there for you. But anyone who has been shopping lately knows, more than a month into a worldwide pandemic, the paper aisle remains an
unmitigated disaster area. So is it ever going to get better? And of all things, why toilet paper in the first place. When consumers of toilet paper first became aware of the novel coronavirus and the possibly lengthy stay at home orders that seemed sure to follow, the reaction generally fell one of two ways. Oh One, let's wait and see see how this thing shakes out, see if all this fuss is for not? And two battened down the bathroom hatches were in here for the long haul. Better stock up.
Back in early March in the United States, it seemed as if the panic buyers and the hoarders clearly had won out, but the perception of a looming shortage may not be entirely accurate. Despite the empty shelves. We spoke Georgia Pacific spokesperson Eric Abercrombie. Georgia Pacific is one of the leading makers of toilet paper in the United States, the company behind angel Soft toilet tissue and Brawny Paper towels.
Abercrombie said, I wouldn't say that there's a shortage because there is paper fibers still available, There's still trees were still making it. The raw materials are there. We're working with our third party vendors for our packaging needs. Those products are there for us to package. It's just a matter of time for it to be made and get out to the stores. Still, the threat of a shortage leads to something that Georgia Pacific's Kim Sackie calls four
oh fear of running out. That explains panic buying and hoarding. Saki told The Chicago Sun Times, if you run out of green beans, you can go without green beans. There are a lot of things you can substitute. There really aren't a lot of substitutes for toilet paper. Greediness and fear of being left with an empty roll on the dispenser doesn't completely answer why many shelves are still cleaned out, though another explanation may lie in a simple supply and
demand formula. More people at home plus more time at home equals greater demand at home. Instead of making use of facilities on campus, in office buildings, at restaurants and coffee shops and bars, or even at rest stops or airports, many people are staying home and using their home facilities. The bottom line, sorry, may be as simple as this. As a nation, we're almost certainly not going more during
these trying times. We're just going more at home, and right now we don't have enough at home product to meet a surging demand. Anyone who's ever made a stop in a public toilet and peeled off a line of sand papery one ply knows the difference between commercial and at home tissue. Abercrombie said, on the consumer side, we saw a two times demand back in mid March, so we quickly are trying to adjust the operations to meet
that demand. According to Abercrombie, siting statistics from Information Resources Incorporated, a market research company based in Chicago, that demand is heavy. An average United States household of two point six people uses four hundred and nine equivalized rolls of toilet paper per year, equivalized roles being kind of an average sized
role among all the mega and double rolls. Consider a job that takes a third of a day, not counting commutes, or a school day that takes somewhere around that at in time, eating out, in various other time away from home. Now roll up all that away from home time and add it to stay at home time. Staying home GP figures would mean around at increase in at home toilet tissue use, and that means, by GPS counting, a two person household would need about nine double rolls or five
megas to last two weeks during this pandemic. A four person household seventeen doubles or nine megas for two weeks. That sounds like a lot if it's accurate. It also sounds like a good argument that actual need, as much as, or maybe more than, greed is what's keeping grocery store shelves barren. Georgia Pacific has fourteen facilities that make bath tissue and paper towels, both retail and commercial in eleven states.
Those places employ around seven thousand, five hundred workers. They're working at about one and twenty percent capacity, Abercrombie says, and they're not alone. We also spoke by email with Lauren Fanroy, a presentative for Procter and Gamble. They said, we're producing and shipping Sharman at record high levels. We're
currently manufacturing and shipping. Demand continues to outpace supply, but we're working diligently to get product to our retailers as fast as humanly possible so everyone can continue to enjoy the go. So what else can be done? All consumers can do at this point is sit and wait for manufacturers to catch up. The good people that make all that toilet paper are already tugging at the supply chain, increasing and varying production where they can, and looking for
efficiencies in packaging and distribution. Heidi Brock, the president of the American Forest and Paper Association, said in a statement. This situation is highly dynamic and changing daily, and the industry is working diligently to respond to the spike in demand for TISSOO products due to coronavirus COVID nineteen purchases. The rest assured Tishoot products continue to be produced and shipped just as they are fifty two weeks each year as part of a gable market. Toilet paper manufacturers are
clearly not meeting that demand quite yet. The TP supply chain has a lot of moving parts. It's not as simple as switching a machine from scratchy one ply to cooshy two ply, or from mega commercial rolls to a double at home sizes. There's the packaging to The companies will have to print more plastic wrap and already are for more home use packages, you know, with the clouds or bears or bunnies or kitties on them, and they'll do fewer of the boxes that go to stores and businesses.
Shipping and storage also remain a challenge. A toilet paper, as relatively bulky and light as it is, never has been an awfully efficient cargo to get from manufacture to store shelf. You can only get so many rolls on a truck. Nobody likes to use storage space on huge packages of toilet paper either. Furthermore, the product's bulk may encourage panic purchases, since fewer packages of toilet paper can fit on one consumer facing shelf than some other products.
It may appear the stores running low more quickly once a few packages are gone. We also spoke with David Kloss, the John H. McConnell Chair Emeritus of the Department of Supply Chain Management at Michigan State University's broad College of Business. He said, it's not easy the relationships. If you're going through the commercial industry, it's a completely different set of
distributors than retailers. There's different flows. Who controls it is different. Still, the people that keep us in cottonell, et cetera are working on it. The shelves for the good at home stuff, as quickly as they're emptied out, are regularly getting filled again. Eventually, and probably soon, suppliers will catch up to the demand, distribution will become a little more streamlined, and when it all comes together, the paper aisle will again be a
safe place to go, so to speak. Today's episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other urgent topics, visit how Stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.