Retail

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Toilet Paper Downsizes in a New Way

We all know that toilet paper has been downsized for decades.  Charmin has gone from 600 or 650 sheets on the roll all the way down to 200 or so over the years. Other brands followed suit.  Even Scott’s 1000 sheet roll was downsized in a sneaky way in 2006 by making each sheet shorter.

The case of Cottonelle’s downsizing is a bit unusual, however.  Look at these two packages of their toilet paper purchased at the same time last month:

Cottonelle 

*MOUSE PRINT:  Both packages give the exact same dimensions for the contents — they say there are 304 sheets on each roll, and that sheets are 4.2 inches by 4.0 inches.  Clearly the package on the left is taller by about 3/4 of an inch (with rolls stacked on top of one another core to core).

What is going on here? The company said:

Because of all the precautions taken in our manufacturing plants, it is difficult to explain how the product you received escaped our detection.  Please accept our apology and our assurance that we will do our best to prevent a recurrence.  The proper roll height is 4.2 inches.  During 2007, we reduced the size of our COTTONELLE® bathroom tissue slightly to align our roll height [number of sheets per roll] with other premium tissue products on the market.  At that time, the sheet width was reduced from 4.5″ down to 4.2″.  The length of each sheet (4.0″ between the perforations) did not change.

So it looks like some of the older 4.5″ width rolls were put into a newer wrapper that had the new lowered sheet count and narrower width on the label.  One can only wonder if this was truly a “mistake” or rather an interim step in the downsizing process to hide the change for anyone comparing the older label to the newer one.

This then appears to be the industry’s latest ploy — downsizing toilet paper by making each sheeter narrower. Toilet paper has historically been 4.5 inches wide as demonstrated by Quilted Northern:

  Northern

If you peruse the supermarket aisle you will notice that very few brands are 4.5 inches wide anymore. (Scott 1000 sheet role still is, for the moment.) Others are 4.3 inches, 4.27 inches, 4.2 inches, or even 4.0 inches.

Angel Soft Charmin Northern

If this trend continues, soon they will be marketing products to us that look more like dental floss than toilet paper.

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The Mouse Print in Black Friday Sale Ads

The best bargain shopping day of the year is Friday after Thanksgiving, and retailers are going to try to entice you to shop at their store with doorbusters that they hope will make you drool.

What they hope you don’t notice is the fine print in their Black Friday ads.

Circuit City has this advisory:

*MOUSE PRINT:

limit one

Minimum one?  I guess when you are in bankruptcy you can’t count on suppliers to fulfill orders for advertised items when the retailer already owes them a ton of money. While it is typical that quantities are limited on Black Friday items, a minimum of one is a rarity.

The lesson here for shoppers: you better be there before the doors open if you want one of Circuit City’s doorbusters (or for that matter, anyone’s doorbusters).

Not to be outdone, Best Buy has their own little bit of bad news tucked away in a footnote.

*MOUSE PRINT:

no price matching

So, if you thought you were smart and bought a Black Friday sale item in advance at a higher price thinking you could go back on Friday to get the difference under their price guarantee, forget it.  Nor can you sleep late, and think you can just prance into Best Buy with a competitor’s ad and get them to match the price.

Lastly, Wal-mart has a pseudo-apology in their fine print:

*MOUSE PRINT:

“We apologize for, but will not be bound by, any errors in our advertisements.”

If Wal-mart is not responsible for their errors, who is?  The customer?

For all Black Friday shopping, avoid disappointment, maybe, by checking the websites of various etailers on Thanksgiving Day and early morning on Friday, to see if the deal you want is orderable online.  That way, you may be able to get the item you want and avoid the crowds.

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P&G’s One Coupon Equals One Meal Deal Revealed

Give a MealProcter & Gamble is advertising a “one coupon = one meal” promotion whereby the company will donate money to Feeding America for every coupon redeemed by shoppers from its November coupon insert.

Feeding America is the new name for America’s Second Harvest — a network of food banks around the country.

Checking P&G’s website, one learns the company has a “goal of donating up to 20 million meals this holiday season.”  Even if P&G was only donating $2 per meal, that would be a commitment of $40 million.  Certainly, a very generous donation to a very worthy cause.

Inside the coupon insert is a further explanation that “for every brandSaver coupon redeemed, P&G will help Feeding America provide one meal to a person in need.”  A simple graphic confirms the message:

That little spot to the right of “one meal” is an asterisk, that leads to an almost unreadable disclosure on the bottom of the page.

*MOUSE PRINT:

” *Coupon value to Feeding America equals $0.0625″

Huh? Six and a quarter cents for each coupon redeemed is what they are donating? How in the world could six and a quarter cents pay for a meal?  And what does this meal consist of — half a cup of rice?

Ross Fraser, the media relations manager for Feeding America explained. The vast majority (85%) of food that they distribute (two billion pounds a year) is donated, while they purchase fill-in items that are not usually contributed.  They have figured out (through somewhat convoluted math) when they divide the number of pounds of food they distribute by their costs of operation, it works out that they are able to donate 16 meals for every dollar they receive.

And, when you do some further math, you see that that equals 6-1/4 cents per meal — the amount that P&G is donating per coupon. Whewww.

So, if enough coupons are redeemed, the maximum contribution that P&G will be making is $1.25 million — not the tens of millions dollars you might have assumed from their advertising.

One and a quarter million dollars is still a generous contribution, and Feeding America is certainly a worthy cause. It just would have been more straight forward to say that they would donate up to $1.25 million to cover the administrative costs of delivering 20 million meals.  A P&G spokesperson said the company preferred to characterize the donation in terms of meals given rather than six and a quarter cents.  Gee, I wonder why? They also said that their contribution was not supposed to be used for overhead.  The spokesperson did not put her comments in writing despite a request to do so by Mouse Print*.

Other companies, like the makers of Duncan Hines, promote their donation to Feeding America in a more straight-forward manner, saying how much money is being given per coupon redeemed, and how much the maximum donation will be (click banner):

Duncan Hines