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The Boys will find a way to insert their greasy little manipulations into every product you buy. Not satisfied with having fully perpetuated the fiction of expiration dates on packaged foods, they're now turning their attention to the other end of the process.
Yesterday I needed to pick up a roll of toilet paper. All my life I've used Scottissue -- it's cheap, it's wrapped without a lot of extraneous layers, it has no cutesy mascots, and I like the texture. But this last roll I've bought -- and I only ever buy one roll at a time -- bears something new on the wrapper: the prominent legend ONE ROLL LASTS ONE WEEK.
I laughed out loud when I see this. One roll, a standard 1000-sheet roll, lasts me close to a month, even with my several-visits-to-the-facility-a-day habit and my generous per-visit allotment of the product. Now, next to the legend in very tiny type, is an obligatory disclaimer: "Based on average family size and usage." But the type is very tiny indeed, and in fact I didn't notice it at all when I first bought the roll. How many shoppers, who don't think about such things, are going to see the ONE ROLL LASTS ONE WEEK statement and figure, "Well, gee, I'm going to be a Smart Shoppa, and I'm going to buy several rolls! Wouldn't want to run short!" The Boys, in their infinite deviousness, are counting on this, just as I'm counting on the day, someday, that Golden Day, when the Boys get all that is coming to them.
I shall always remember being behind a quite elderly fellow (90 or more, I’d guess) in a supermarket checkout line who had a jumbo pack of toilet paper in his cart, one of those bundles so large it barely fit in the basket.
When my turn at the cashier came up she and I voiced the same sentiment, something along the lines of: “Now there’s an optimist for ya.”
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