How to Really Save Money Comparing Toilet Paper Prices
Buying toilet paper doesn’t have to be as complicated or expensive as it is. Brands love to spray their packaging, claiming that one of their ” mega rolls ” is 12 or 18 “regular rolls,” but are less outspoken about how much real paper they give you. This makes it nearly impossible to compare prices from brand to brand, or even within offerings of the same brand.
Of course, that’s the point. If you come across dozens of functionally identical product bundles touting similar (but also conflicting) marketing statements, you are likely to give up trying to make an informed choice and just pick something at random. Brands are aware of this, so they put as many options on the shelves as possible in the hope that customers will buy one of them. Fortunately, you can compare prices; you just need to do a little math first.
How to split the price
First, find the total square footage for each option you are considering. Most brands list it on their packaging, but an increasing number do not. If square meters are missing, take the number of sheets per roll and multiply by the total number of rolls to get the total number of sheets per package. These numbers are small and hard to read, but at least one of them will be.
From here, you can split the price into dollars per unit or units per dollar. In dollars per unit, divide the package price by the total square footage (or by the total number of sheets). For per dollar units, divide the total square footage (or total sheets) by the packaging cost. To save money, you want to minimize dollars per unit or maximize units per dollar. You can use any of these calculations as you like, but you must use the same formula consistently for accurate comparisons.
Don’t believe the store math
Unfortunately, you will have to do these calculations yourself because unit prices on store shelves are notoriously unreliable. For example, this list from my local Safeway website breaks down the price by “quantity”, but does not specify what “quantity” is (my annotation):
A quick check reveals that this is the price per roll: $ 1.11 x 18 rolls per pack = $ 19.98. (Thanks for the rounding guys!) Considering most of its competitors are priced at $ 3-4 per 100 square feet, Quilted Northern looks like a steal – until you realize that $ 1.11 a roll is roughly $ 3.70 per roll. piece. 100 square feet.
In-store unit prices can also be completely wrong, like this one claiming that a $ 20.99 pack of toilet paper is somehow worth $ 116.61 per 100 square feet (my annotation):
According to the label, this package contains 516 square feet of paper. At $ 20.99 a pack, that’s $ 0.04 per square foot, or about $ 4 per 100 square feet. I bet $ 116.61 is the wholesale unit price, or what the store pays for a box of that particular item.
Is toilet paper math a huge pain in the ass? Yes, incredible! Unfortunately, this is the only way to cut through the jungle of bullshit and find out how much you actually pay for toilet paper. Once you’ve found a brand you like at an affordable price, stock up when it goes on sale. You will never have to do math again – at least not until it resizes the roll for you.