"Oh my God ... a winter storm is coming ... go to the grocery store and buy every gallon of bottled water and every loaf of bread ... we can't possibly use it all ... but if we don't empty the shelves, we're all gonna die!!!"
In northern New England, we always have storms in the winter. Usually one right after the other. Snow falls, we shovel it, and it falls again. After a lifetime of that, we made the decision to start wintering in Florida where it doesn't snow! My bones don't ache, the sun shines daily, and life is quite nice!
I generally ignore the "Chicken Little the sky is falling" stuff, so imagine my dismay when I discovered we actually couldn't buy any toilet paper once the "news" announced that we were all going to be locked down due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Sure as "shit" ... we went to our favorite Winn-Dixie store on Seminole Boulevard ... and there was none to be found! We went to Publix ... Walmart ... Neighborhood Market ... Dollar General ... Family Dollar ... not a single roll ... anywhere! We started going at odd times, and finally found some early one morning at good-old Winn-Dixie!
The media had induced a panic-buying situation that completely decimated the supply chain ... and made it impossible for anyone who had not preemptively purchased a year's supply of bathroom tissue to find a single roll. What if we could never buy TP again?
But then ... I remembered!
My maternal grandfather ... Clarence A. Robinson ... worked in a paper mill in Gorham, NH. Many years ago, just prior to his retirement in the early 1960's he was involved in the installation of a new tissue machine at the Brown Company Cascade Mill.
At our family lake cottage, in Maidstone, Vermont, there is a roll of toilet paper in a plain paper wrapper. Written on the wrapper in pencil is my grandfather's handwriting ... "from first good reel of paper made on new Tissue Machine Cascade Mill May 7, 1962."
This roll of TP has been safely tucked away since 1962 ... maybe Gramps knew something we didn't about the Great Shortage of 2020 that would come to pass 58 years in the future!
Paper mills used to be scattered throughout northern New England, located alongside powerful rivers that provided not only a source of power, but a means of getting the raw material (trees) to the pulp mills. For the most part they are now gone ... a victim of a changing paper demand and higher transportation costs that makes it much less costly to manufacture low-quality softwood paper (like tissue) in other parts of the country. One mill in New Hampshire is still producing tissue ... the former Brown Company mill at Cascade ... on the same machine that produced our heirloom roll.
Paper machines operate on a 24 hour schedule, shutting down only for repairs or scheduled maintenance. They can only produce so much paper each day. There is very little excess capacity within that industry. Once the supply chain has been wiped out by panic and hoarding it will take some time for it to recover. Good luck to us all!
We used to have a supply of low quality paper delivered to our homes several times a year in the form of the "Sears, Roebuck & Company" catalogs. It made for a good emergency supply ... like if we ever got snowed in for a week and couldn't make it to the store!
Of course, the Sears catalog has gone the way of the buggy whip ... obsolete and no longer manufactured. Replacing it, of course is Amazon and Internet shopping ... and no matter how hard you try or how desperate you become, you can't wipe your butt with a web page!
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