I was mortified by how much time I spent yesterday trying to figure out the cost per roll of paper toilet tissue, and then I was stunned by the fact that I couldn't tell when buying in bulk was actually smart and when it was wasteful.
My local warehouse store retails 48-roll packages of toilet tissue at 0.52 per roll. Online merchants charge the same prices but have runaway freight charges. Then I found wholesale sites such as Alibaba where paper toilet tissue is selling at half the retail price or better, that is, until I realized that I have zero storage space in an apartment with two bedrooms.
My closets are already full. My garage is shared. My bathroom has a space of four square feet. The savings in costs are factual, but the logistics are absurd. I attempted working out break-even points, including the cost of renting a storage facility (obviously insane) or dividing bulk orders with neighbors (coordination nightmare). It would only work with free and unrestricted storage, which mine certainly is not.
What do other cost-effectively minded people do when it comes to performing large-scale purchases of toilet tissue without converting their house into a warehouse? Do you divide orders, rent storage, or simply accept that some bulk deals can not be made even when you do save money?
Bulk toilet paper math-when is it smarter to buy bulk quantities than small ones?
byu/spiritprabhas inFrugal
Posted by spiritprabhas
33 Comments
Bidet all the way.
We buy one big pack at Costco about 3 times a year. It’s affordable and we have no reason to store more.
I just think about the time to value ratio of research and figuring it out. I don’t have too much money, but I have enough where if I’m smart I can stretch it and be comfortable. If I can wipe my ass for >4 months for <25 bucks, I’m not gonna think too much about specific pricing unless I come upon a random deal, cause thats a lot of math and planning overhead for such small savings (and my job is mathematics, lol). If it starts to creep below those thresholds, then I’ll pay more attention and research what exactly is the most optimal. Thats how I think of most purchases. I’m not the most optimized, but I’m very frugal. This includes storage. If the deal is best for 3 packages, but it stresses me out to have 3 packages, then I’ll just get 2 packages and store it comfortably as long as it’s below my cost thresholds. I guess my plan is the path of least stressors. If stress of storage is greater than stress of cost, optimize storage over cost, and vice versa, then just move on. My life is stressful enough, I don’t want to freak out over fucking toilet paper
I think you’re overthinking it.
Is there anyone you know who’d like to split the toilet paper with you? If no, just buy it in a supermarket like everyone else.
I might be able to save a dollar ordering online, but when I’m already at the store it makes more sense to just buy it. At some point, the time spent researching costs more than the money saved, and that time isn’t coming back.
I think in your situation you have to accept buying 48 at a time.
For me it is worth it, but I live on a farm and can donate a whole shed to toilet roll, sawdust and newspapers. We have some compost toilets and woodburners. Also I’m shopping for 17 people and don’t want to have to do so too often. I do the price per sheet about every 5 years to check my choice is still right – then order from one particular site once, maybe twice, a year, when they have their 20% off sale.
We also order laundry liquid and washing up liquid at the same time in bulk containers.
buy a bidet, it will pay for itself quickly. Possible even faster for females than it did for me. a single male.
I live in a 1BR. I try to keep 60 decent sized rolls stacked up on one side of my dresser. I have half of an upper shelf in the closet free right now, but I’d need a step ladder. I don’t want to deal with that due to balance issues. I need to have a closet edit. It’s a very small walk-in closet and a large water heater is there, so it’s a challenge. So here’s the advice, go high for more storage. Gut a closet, and make more space. Or go low, for example, under the bed. Whenever it’s time to replace furniture, try to incorporate storage. If you want to see some eye candy that deals with this, take a look at modern Japanese homes. There are so many inventive ideas there.
For us it makes the most sense to not put in all kinds of additional orders for these relatively small costs. I do a weekly grocery order and about every 2 months I order baby stuff from an online drugstore (diapers, formula etc). Toilet paper is cheaper at the drugstore so I order it there. I pay about 7 euro’s per 2 months for the whole family. It’s really not worth it to put in more effort than this.
My 2c is that frugality is not about putting yourself in situations where you spend hours agonizing how you spend your money.
I live in a very small place, and buy one box of 48 rolls once every 18months or so. When it arrives, there is a process of stashing them all around the place – hidden at the top of my closet, under the bed, in the bathroom etc. I prefer this to buying more frequently. Sounds like you need a bit of a declutter if your closets are totally full?
Is it frugal to move to a larger apartment just so that you have room to store large quantities of toilet paper? I suspect that you’d save money by going with smaller packages.
You can also invest in a bidet attachment for your toilet and cut waaay down on toilet paper use.
Smartest move is to buy a bidet, tp consumption will go down 90%
We go through a a lot of paper, being a family and also I run a home daycare. So I buy giant packs and avoid buying more often. I buy double rolls that triple, because those don’t fit my in-wall holders in my 80s bathroom.
For an individual person, it won’t make much difference over a year. Konmari recommends storing no more than about 6 months worth of anything consumable, which sends reasonable to me – not to say you can’t stock up a bit more if you have the space, but there’s no need to stock up a decade worth to save a few cents.
Consider rather: if you buy a lot at once and are stocked up with staples that don’t go bad, maybe your in-between shopping trips can be done by foot or bike, rather than the car. Maybe it’s easier to budget stock-up trips for things like this, or flour, laundry soap etc, a couple times a year, and smaller weekly grocery runs, rather than constantly having to estimate monthly expenditure on such items.
as long as you have discipline not to over buy/use and the storage space. case: after coming out with the super concentrated tide liquid, their sales when thru the roof. not due to ppl switching, but more ppl just used *more*. and still to this day going strong on the profits side.
I don’t price it out by roll, but rather in square feet.
Get a bidet
Buy the bulk TP.
Costco earns 73% of their profit from membership fees.
Their maximum gross margin on Kirkland products average 15% (I assume toilet paper is a lot less).
Lots of pop up ads:
https://www.fool.com/investing/2025/12/05/how-costco-makes-money-despite-150-hot-dog-combos/
Add a bidet attachment and just use less tp.
Bidet..lessens TP usage. Bidet you install for 25-30$. Easy
A bidet will cut your tp usage in half at a minimum.
Still need to dry up a bit.
Buy a bidet, it is cheaper
Spend $40 on a bidet you can install in minuets and eliminate the need for bulk altogether
Renting a storage facility? Dude, jesus christ, put them under your sink cabinet if youre that desperate for space
Compare how much money you save with how much convenience you give up, and split the difference.
I would not be inconveniencing myself for anything less than hundreds of dollars in savings. YMMV
Bidet so you don’t have to use so much toilet paper.
I think you may be over focusing on ‘warehouse stores’. Last week, my regular retail grocer had a coupon with their store brand 2-ply ‘wide’ mega roll which came at $0.54 per roll, and it is quite decent quality.
For those who measure by sqft, it’s 1425 sqft per roll.
If we want to deep dive it, using the store credit card with 5% cash back on store brand items, it’s less than $0.52 per roll. tbh, they do this kind of discount quite often.
Bottom line, don’t ignore coupons and special offers at your local retail stores.
Edit to add, it was 30 mega roll pack.
>until I realized that I have zero storage space in an apartment with two bedrooms.
>My closets are already full.
This is from someone who is on r/declutter and r/minimalism, but your statement demonstrates the lost opportunity costs of the owning, the maintaining and the *storing* of whatever random stuff that you have.
If you love every single piece of whatever you have in your closet, more than the factual savings cost, then don’t fret it. You’re doing perfectly fine. Convenience store price TP vs Warehouse bigbox TP.
Ideally, if you use TP enough, you can have it all, a full closet, in a bigger apartment with more space to store TP. But then, in a constrained resource called a wallet, you lose lost opportunity costs from having a lighter wallet if you don’t actually use that much TP in a month.
Pragmatically speaking. There’s plenty of space to store TP. Maybe not in the big plastic square it comes in, but then you’re going to have to remember where you squirrled away every roll. Like a squirrel.
Is your living environment so properly organized and packed fuller than an expert game of tetris that you don’t have space anywhere?
The simplest answer of course is bidet.
Install a $30 bidet attachment and use much less. Buy the Scott 1000 single roll for $1.30, 104 sqft/roll they say it last a week.
Buy a washlet instead and dry with washcloths. You will save so much money in the long run. I still have TP for guests.
You forgot to account for the cost of your time figuring all this out plus the opportunity cost of spending a lot of money into toilet paper vs investing it.
When it’s a superior deal you easily have the storage space.
I’ve found what makes the biggest difference is the quality and length of one roll, because depending on brand. some tp lasts me at least twice as long as others. so I would calculate per an unit of time not per roll. go through a couple brands and kinds over a longer time period and you’ll get a reliable average.