Peticanoe

We have two types of paper towel in our office.  One is the half-way environmentally friendly recycled brown stuff.  The stuff that, in a pinch, you use as facial tissue that leaves you permanently scarred and disfigured in the nasal regions.  It is unpeforated and so one must tear it where destiny selects.  This is paper towel that I can get alongside, despite all of its shortcomings.  It gives you the most usability for cost.  The other type seems to be fairly common.Type two paper towel is light and fluffy.  It lacks the industrial grunge-y charm of the type one items.  It will have patterns ‘quilted’ into it.  It is often white or near enough as makes no useable difference.  It is highly absorbent and will, if used properly, give a reasonably streakless shine to mirrors and chrome.  It’s good for putting under bacon to soak up excess grease.  This is the non-friendly, planet killer paper towel from the past.

My biggest beef with type two?  The sheet size.

Bounty, in their wisdom, came up with something called ‘Select-A-Size’ several years ago.  Apparently, paper towel sheets were simply too big.  People don’t really need a full sheet for most jobs and tearing the sheets up is just annoying.  Their solution to this presumed quandary was to reduce the sheet size.  Not to a half sheet.  Oh, no.  That would have been too closely in line with the 10% of users who didn’t require a full sheet.  They reduced the size of the sheet to two-thirds.  Two-thirds of a sheet of paper towel is meeting no-one’s needs.  It is too large for the half-sheet uses but it is too small for any other use.  Things like soaking up bacon fat are perfect single sheet uses.  Two of these two-thirds sheets is far too much and is wasteful.

All of the paper towel manufacturers seem to have gone to this system, now.  I don’t think it is possible to purchase the old style of paper towels.  The ones I miss.  The ones that were useful and didn’t require me to repurchase them quite so oft-

Very clever, Bounty.  Very clever.

spend a little lifetime living in the gutter