The Incredible Shrinking Toilet Paper | The Source Weekly - Bend

The Incredible Shrinking Toilet Paper

Today The Eye turns from inconsequential matters like health care reform, the state budget deficit and real estate fraud and focuses on an issue of more intimate concern to our readers: the shrinking size of the toilet paper in public restrooms.

I’ve been noticing this trend for the past couple of years, but I was pushed over the brink of outrage when I went into the men’s room in Café Yumm in the Old Mill District the other day and saw a roll of toilet paper that appeared to have been made for a dollhouse.

An actual side-by-side measurement of the mini-toilet paper next to a piece of normal, home-style toilet paper (from my own home, actually) revealed that the teeny-weeny toilet paper is a mere 3.75” in width compared to 4.5” for the “regular” version – a difference of a full three-quarters of an inch.

(NOTE: The toilet paper sold to the public for home consumption has been decreasing in width too, by about half an inch, but that’s a different issue.)

Moreover, the restaurant mini-toilet paper is made of a flimsy, wimpy, gossamer substance that looks like it might have been woven from spider webs. (On second thought, it doesn’t – spider webs would be stronger.) This pathetic stuff is barely adequate for wiping a child’s nose, much less performing the more robust function for which it was ostensibly intended.

What’s the motive behind the shrinkage? Well, it could be cost savings. Or, because Café Yumm tries to project such an eco-conscious image, it could be a “green” gesture. Saving trees, reducing carbon emissions and all that.

Either way it doesn’t make sense – because a patron is going to have to reel off about 40 feet of the stuff to get the job done properly.

Personally, I would rather feed a dime or quarter into a dispenser to get a supply of real toilet paper than have to deal with this pathetic substitute.

But why should we have to? Doesn’t restaurant food cost enough these days to expect the management to provide us with decent, functional toilet paper instead of this … this … excremental substitute?

It’s time to call the restaurants that perpetrate this fraud to account, and I look forward to getting help from the readers of this blog to do it. Let me know about inadequate toilet paper when you find it and I’ll pass the word on.

You can even mail or drop off samples at the Source as evidence – unused, of course.