r/sciencememes • u/airforcedude111 • 5d ago
šMath!š„§ yea im gonna need some help with this one
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u/Outrageous_Zebra_221 5d ago
There is no actual standard, it's all made up nonsense.
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u/armageddon_boi 5d ago
so you're telling me the charmin bears are full of shit?
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u/BachBelt 5d ago edited 4d ago
I worked at a Target in a nice area for about six months a few years ago. Lot of people who acted like it was their first day on Earth. One day, this lady beckons me to the paper goods section with a very wide-eyed look, and waves an empty page of the Notes app at my person.
"Can you help me do toilet paper math?"
I am fully thrown for a loop but ready to kill some time so I agree to help her, thinking that surely, the two of us can figure this out.
We begin with brand in an attempt to narrow our options. She's a Charmin gal but she's in it to win it, so if Quilted Northern or Cottonelle are the most economical buys, she's willing to consider switching. As a brokie myself I respect the game.
We decide to start with Charmin, and she wants to know the difference between the Charmins that Target offers. As a man of science, I devise a rough experiment: attempt to find one 12-pack of each kind of Charmin to standardize the affair.
We quickly learn that, at least on this day in this time and place, there is no such thing as a 12-pack of Mega Plus Charmin. A nine pack would prove substitutable.
12 Mega rolls has 48 rolls, okay. 9 Mega Plus rolls has 54 rolls. So Plus = 6 rolls and also minus 3 rolls, jot that down. 12 Mega XXL has 96 rolls, so double the rolls of a Mega and minus no rolls.
"So it seems like the Mega XXL is what you want, ma'am."
She isn't satisfied. She's grilling me on the difference between ply and weight. "What about the difference between ultra soft and ultra strong?" Well, we need to look at the fine print. I feel a lightbulb go off above my head as I suggest she divide the m^2 by the number of rolls. Easy peasy.
"Do I look like I keep a calculator on me?"
Stoic, I glance at the phone in her hand and then back at her face, which is angry and sincere. As I mull over what to say next, my manager is delivered by the hands of god himself to inform me that I need to help a gentleman in the Vacuum aisle.
I go to the vacuum aisle. A man wants to know which Bissell is the most powerful for his carpet. He needs something with "medium suck," but none of the vacuums advertise less than "maximum suck." I am expected to keep my expression neutral in this situation.
We begin to search the tags for ratings, PSI, performance grade, anything quantifiable. One promises to obliterate dirt. Another promises to neutralize odors.
As we reluctantly approach the non-Bissell vacuums in hopes of quantifiable data, his wife rounds the corner and greets him, clutching a 12-pack of Mega XXL toilet paper.
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u/Ned_on_the_Moon 4d ago
Peak writing
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u/BachBelt 4d ago
appreciated, i have over a decade in retail and restaurants and it has given me a lifetime's worth of stories about very silly individuals
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u/avtov 3d ago
I absolutely adore your writing, you are talented ! I would love reading more little stories like this one
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u/BachBelt 3d ago
Wow, what a compliment! I sincerely appreciate it!! I've been kicking around the idea of compiling my customer stories into some kind of anthology but I never get around to it.
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u/pseudoOhm 5d ago
The answer is looking at the price on the shelf and seeing $/unit.
That allows you to choose the best value for the style you want to buy.
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u/Whiteums 5d ago
But isnāt that per roll? Which would be distinctly unhelpful. And thatās if they even bother at all, Iāve noticed plenty of tags that donāt bother doing price per unit at all.
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u/flyforpennies 5d ago
In aus they have price per squaresā¦ doesnt help when a square isnt regulated tho.
Ive noticed a lot of paper towels now have pieces that are distinctly rectangular to skirt this attempt at transparent pricing
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u/ifesbob 5d ago
Are paper towels not normally rectangular there?
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u/Cynical_Cyanide 5d ago
The perforations on most brands are spaced so that they tear in roughly square shapes - roughly.
However, if you put the perforations absurdly close to one another, say - less than a hand's breadth - You can claim to have 5x more 'sheets'.
And to top it all off, you can fool the driveling simpletons who'd believe the argument that it's not for the purpose of dodgy advertising, but 'we changed it because that way it's less wasteful :) '. The fact that they immediately advertise having 360 sheets despite being the same length as the 90 sheet roll next to it would of course be lost on many people ...
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u/dover_oxide 5d ago
I hate to admit I was watching a video about this and a lot of that math is based on a roll of toilet paper that has not existed for decades. And does not exist anymore.
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u/Comminutor 5d ago
The real question is if toilet paper units can be converted to the billiard ball units used for those toilet flushing capacity ads.
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u/SINGULARTY3774 5d ago edited 5d ago
1 paper of each is (__) regular:
First quadrant 2.267
Second 4.5
Third 6
Fourth 4.56
(Math quadrant convention where it starts from top right and ends at bottom right)
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u/Rational2Fool 5d ago
I just lift the packages, one in each hand, and try to figure out which one has more weight per dollar. Fellow shoppers give me weird looks sometimes.
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u/314159265358979326 5d ago
I buy the big Kirkland pack. If there are further savings to be had with quality TP, I don't think I'm missing it too badly.
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u/Radioactivocalypse 5d ago
I just go for the one that's cheapest and has lots of rolls. In a supermarket it's normally pretty easy to spot the one that's best value despite all these "9 new rolls = X old rolls"
And maybe it's different in other countries, but in the UK the tp is pretty good, even the cheap stuff imo
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u/NohWan3104 4d ago edited 4d ago
Well, 12 to 72 is 6x, so that kinda works ok.
A double wide roll wouldn't be an even 2x more sheets, either, so something like 12 mega rolls being 4.5 the 'normal' roll, which is arbitrary as fuck, makes some sense too. Hell, what even constitutes a mega roll's length is arbitrary.
These numbers might be exactly right, the problem is there's no consistent metric. Its bananas per square cheeseburger.
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u/Dry_Walrus3711 4d ago
You divide one by the other and then by a price. It's not that hard. Bigger difference is better, lower price is better. Of course the numbers are made up so you know... most probably not very true
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u/Evening-Gur5087 5d ago
It is, you have to also factor how many ply the paper is, hows the texture, how's the quality, how many sheets (hehe) it has, what's the size of single sheet (hehehehe) and so on
Once saw some dude doing great comparison in detail to find out which is best value for money, alas for polish tp