6 February—With two unhousebroken puppies in the house, even though they’re confined to an exercise pen most of the time and are learning to use training pads for bodily functions rather than chew toys, the need for paper towels has arisen. (Note: Hope and Glory are just now learning to live with collars, harnesses, and leashes; and they’ve visited the run but haven’t yet realized its primary function—or secondary function if you consider exercise primary. How silly.)

I have a few hundred dollars worth of Home Depot gift cards that CVS Aetna has (had?) been good enough to bribe—make that reward—me with for doing various allegedly proactive medical things (but probably not for much longer; the bribes have diminished through the years, just like CVS Aetna’s OTC, dental, and vision benefits; the Aetna website hints the bribes will be back this year, but given CVS’s monumental mismanagement and today’s announcement of even more Aetna layoffs, among other things, that’s rather doubtful).

Back to Home Depot, then, why not use a little of the CVS Aetna bribe to buy paper towels? Sure, I’d do better at Amazon, but I wouldn’t have to pay Home Depot out of pocket. So I went to the Home Depot website and typed in “paper towels.” Of course Bounty hogged the paper towel pages. No surprise, since Bounty is probably the best-selling brand of paper towels and likely slips Home Depot placement fees too.

But the options Home Depot offers for Bounty paper towels alone are incredible. And disgusting. Double rolls, double-plus rolls, triple rolls in various quantities. And more. No piddling old-fashioned single rolls, mind you. And no information on the size of “select-a-size” sheets, with quantity in a roll or multi-pack available only after lots of digging. Just hype piled on more hype.

It’s impossible to find out how many variations of Bounty paper towels there are on the market in sheet size, sheet count, and packaging. Let’s just say it’s infinite. The Bounty website is even less informative than the Home Depot website. It tells you absolutely nothing of value, nothing you really want to know, just how great the Bounty paper towels are.

And that’s not at all surprising, since Bounty paper towels are manufactured and intensely marketed by Procter & Gamble, the good folks who invented or at least perfected the ever-shrinking toilet paper roll with best-selling Charmin.

Remember when a roll of Charmin bog scroll was available in only one size, 750 sheets, as I recall, though it may have been more. (P&G never bothered to answer my inquiry a few years ago.) Well, among the Charmin offerings now on the shelves are the smallest (what used to be regular) Mega rolls, Mega XXL rolls, and Family Mega XL. God forbid anything could be called regular or standard.

P&G’s hype for the Charmin Mega XXL roll says it contains 440 sheets, and claims that’s equivalent to eight regular rolls. So the Mega XXL contains roughly half the sheets (that are smaller, by the way) that a standard Charmin roll contained when we got value for money. And if you do the simple arithmetic, 440 divided by 8, you discover that a (nonexistent, imaginary) standard roll of Charmin in 2026 contains all of 55 sheets.

Using differential calculus, then, we reckon that in a few years P&G will be marketing Charmin in one-sheet rolls . . .