My place of employment has public restrooms, and as is always the case with places that have public restrooms (and often even if they don't) they stock the worst shit tickets in Christendom. If there's a ply which is less than one-ply, that's this stuff. It takes three sheets of it to reach the sturdiness of packing tissue, and yet it somehow also manages to feel like you're wiping your bunghole with industrial wood-chipping waste that was too rough to be included in sandpaper. I'm telling you, this bumwad is bad.
Now, I have plenty to say on the subject of cheap ass confetti. They do it not to save a buck, although that's a happy side effect for them. They do it to discourage people from stealing it and to discourage people from using the bathroom at all. Be that as it may, I understand the evil logic of it.
But lately, the lavatorial pulp product has been slightly different.
Now I assume you know that, in your higher-quality toilet tissues, part of the manufacturing process is to imprint what they call "quilting" onto the paper. Even lower-rent bog roll does this, though in most cases it's not enough. But it's done to hold the plies, if there are more than one, together, but more importantly to increase the surface area and thus absorption of the bumph and thus to use less of it by making it thicker without actually adding material to it. Yeah, it's cheaper than actually making the stuff thicker. It's always the bottom line, no pun intended.
But it must cost them something to add that step the process, which in your cadillac models doesn't matter because of the savings, plus people expect it. And therein lies the rub, no pun intended.
Because as it costs something, industrial wood-chipping waste products usually don't bother with it. You can also fit more on a roll if it's thinner, meaning that you have to change the paper less often, another savings. So it comes as no surprise that the "paper" used by most public toilets is not quilted. In fact, it usually seems to have gone through some kind of laminating process to make it even thinner and even harder. Public lavatory paper is almost shiny. I mean it's terrible.
Hell, for my employer's TP, they've cut one more step out of the manufacturing process by eliminating the perforations which allow one to tear off a measured amount of the roll. You wind up tearing it to pieces trying, and it somehow manages to be both too fragile for its intended purpose and too sturdy to tear when pulled, especially since the dispensers are mounted two inches from the floor and facing in a direction which causes the paper to twist as you attempt to pull it out, making it even less useful. I really hate public toilet paper. I can't stress it highly enough.
But lately, the paper has been different, as I said. How? Well, the company that produces this paper, realizing that it could possibly be brought up on charges of crimes against humanity by the ICC, has added a crucial feature which was missing that it knows everyone wants.
The company has printed quilting on the paper. In ink. Along with its logo.
Now, I'm not sure, but it seems like maybe, just maybe, if you can incorporate a printing press into your manufacturing process, you could probably also, for less money, incorporate a roller, just one, which would lightly crease the paper in a pattern resembling quilting. It's a one time cost. You never need to buy ink. You don't need to make any changes to the quality of the product. You can just make it slightly, ever so slightly, better, rather than dropping your pants and mooning the consumer as you laugh and set money on fire.
The rational part of my brain can think of reasons why you might not quilt your toilet paper. It probably makes the paper slightly weaker, which might lead to problems with the speed or tension of the rolls in other areas of manufacture. As said above, it would make the paper slightly thicker, which would mean various drawbacks. And above all else, it might increase the cost of manufacturing the paper unacceptably when you're committed to producing the lowest bid paper so as to corner the market on terrible, terrible TP.
But to print the quilting on seems insulting, frankly. It's as if the executives in charge of the company had a meeting where they were disturbed to learn that some people were still able to use public restrooms without hating every second of the experience and feeling degraded, and these executives tasked a multi-billion dollar R&D department to come up with a way to give these people the finger, repeatedly. There's no reason to spend extra money to make a product worse except spite. What did the public do to these executives?
Anyway, it's a small thing, but I hope maybe it radicalizes you just a tiny bit. Capitalism is ruining your shit in so many ways, but this one literally.
👩🦯The Blind Fraggle
David K
May Likes Toronto
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