If I won the lottery

 

If I won the lottery the first thing I'd do is buy enough toilet rolls and enough bin liners for the rest of my life.

It's tempting to say "anyway" here and just finish the blog post but I thought I'd try and get all Matt Webb about this.

I've long held the theory that we shouldn't run out of certain things in my house. We're a stable enough household with a regular income and predictable demand cycles that some things should be automatic. Of course we're not running our house like a Foxconn warehouse but still how hard would it be to predict and estimate how many bin liners we need?

Asterisk: we live in a house with two teenagers so black swan events do occur.

Of course some people think bulk buying bin liners and toilet rolls is madness, especially beyond a month or so of demand. But the functional designer in me thinks that bin liners and toilet rolls are never going to go out of date and in fact buying them now realises a huge inflation saving! Storage space might be an issue but let's deal with that later.

First let's think about how many you'd need of the rest of of your life. I'm 47 and the average life expectancy of a UK male is 80 years old. So I've got 33 years left to live. (That doesn't sound like much tbh.)

The average UK household uses 100 toilet rolls a year so that's 3,300 more toilet rolls. A hipster toilet roll like Who Gives A Crap costs £1 a roll so that's £3,300.

I can't find stats for black bin liner usage but I reckon we use 3 a week. My 33 years equates to 1,716 weeks. Bin liners cost 60p each so that's £3,088.

£6,694 would buy you enough toilet rolls and enough bin bags to last the rest of your life.

Maybe we should bite the bullet and do that now. Storage might be a problem. Hence the lottery win and I could buy a house with a room just for bog roll and bin bags like the Kardashians or something.

Anyway.

Comments

[Phil Gyford]

Your RSS feed has come to life again, after all the TypePad kerfuffle. Nice to have you back.

When I was a kid I decided that if I was rich I would only ever wear brand new socks, because they were always nicer than washed ones. Didn't really think about sustainability in those days.

[twitter.com/markpack]

Just don't do what I did when I had similar thoughts about lightbulbs and ended up with a stock that is scheduled to last comfortably longer than my life span.