With the spread of COVID-19 in North America, people in the United States and Canada are hoarding toilet paper. Why is toilet paper as precious as gold?

With the outbreak of the epidemic, everyone seems to have turned on their hamster nature and hoarded various daily necessities and food. However, what puzzles many domestic friends is that in the United States and Canada, people seem to love hoarding toilet paper, and toilet paper in supermarkets is hard to find. This is mainly due to the large consumption of rolling paper in the two countries, coupled with media publicity.

According to data, the average American uses three times as much paper as our country per year, up to more than 140 rolls. This data made me sigh, is toilet paper for foreigners used for eating? But after careful calculation, foreigners do prefer to use paper. Even for daily furniture cleaning, they rarely use rags. They basically use paper. For them, they can throw away after wiping, which requires more washing than wiping. It is much more convenient to use a drying rag. Many foreign friends around me think that rags are unhygienic, so let alone the epidemic, I think they like to buy paper. In addition, labor costs in Europe and the United States are extremely high, and express delivery is not as cheap as in China. After the outbreak of the epidemic, the transportation cost of toilet paper was extremely high, so many families immediately went to supermarkets to purchase toilet paper and stock up.

Another point is that toilet paper is expensive, which is inseparable from the media’s publicity. In the early days, there was a report that toilet paper could be a temporary substitute for masks when masks were unavailable. After this article was overturned, some media reported that the raw materials of toilet paper and masks are the same. People are no longer calm now. Masks are no longer available. If the raw materials are the same, won’t there be no toilet paper in the future? Therefore, every household started a paper hoarding journey. As we all know, people have a herd mentality. When he finds that people around him are starting to hoard paper, even if he thinks it is unnecessary, he will subconsciously buy it. Naturally, toilet paper becomes more and more valuable.

Therefore, the reason why toilet paper is so valuable during special periods is mostly due to everyone’s panic. But in this regard, every country is similar. Just like there was a joke before, foreigners can’t understand why Chinese people stock up on salt from time to time. From this point of view, people all over the world are somewhat strangely paranoid.