- Retailers are still having trouble keeping household essentials like hand sanitizer and toilet paper stocked on the shelves as the COVID-19 coronavirus panic shows no signs of slowing down.
- To help stop all the panic-buying so that there will be more supplies to go around, a new website has been built that calculates how long your current stash of toilet paper should last.
- Simply input how many rolls you currently have on hand and how many trips to the bathroom you make daily, and the calculator estimates how many days before your supply runs out.
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One of the defining images associated with the coronavirus crisis that’s got the US and much of the rest of the world locked in the grips of a catastrophic panic is that of empty store shelves. Almost as soon as the crisis began to take hold and people learned more and more about the deadly virus, shoppers around the world raced to stock up (and in many cases, hoard) household essentials like hand sanitizer and toilet paper.
That’s still the case in many places around the country, with retailers struggling to keep the shelves stocked and resorting to measures like cutting store hours to give themselves more breathing room to get a handle on their inventory. Which is why it shouldn’t come as a surprise that someone has now built a toilet paper calculator — a website that you can use to input how many rolls you have on hand, and how often you make trips to the toilet each day, to make an estimate of how long your stash should last you.
Head over to https://howmuchtoiletpaper.com to check it out. You can move two sliding scales to adjust the number of rolls you have on hand as well as how many daily trips you make to the bathroom. For someone with 10 rolls of toilet paper on hand who visits the toilet twice a day, for example, the calculator estimates your stash of toilet paper should last more than two months.
“We are hoping that people will use the site and see they don’t need to go out and empty the shelves,” the two UK residents who built the site, Ben Sassoon and Sam Harris, told The Verge. They add that most users of the site so far have 500% of the amount of toilet paper they’d need in a quarantine — and, with the graphic above, you can see that someone with 10 rolls currently has even more than that.
The site notes that it was “created by London based student Software Developer Ben Sassoon and Artist Sam Harris after they had a discussion about how much toilet paper they each used on a day to day basis and how that would change during the pandemic. It has now been used by over 2,000,000 people and is helping to reduce toilet paper shortage round the world.”
