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IPFS News Link • Pandemic

Why Are There Toilet Paper Shortages around the World?

• https://fee.org, Amanda Snell

Americans have seen scarcity, bailouts, price fluctuations, and epidemics before, but one thing seems to set the coronavirus emergency apart:

The toilet paper.

Shelves where the product once was stored are bare—and not just in the US. The United Kingdom has experienced similar shortages, leading consumers to purchase toilet paper substitutes (at the risk of the sewage system), and an Australian newspaper went so far as to print eight blank pages in a recent issue to be used in case of emergency for, you guessed it, toilet paper.

The desire to hoard during a pandemic may be totally natural, but hoarding for some means scarcity for others.

What is a good solution for this problem? Many stores have instigated their own rationing devices (limits of X amount of toilet paper, hand sanitizers, etc., per customer), with others instituting hours of shopping reserved for the elderly or immunocompromised.

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by PureTrust
Entered on:

Why? So that when the paper and tissue mill workers are laid off later - you don't think that the mills will keep them on when nobody is buying paper products any longer, do you? - then we all get to pay their unemployment.



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