Ever wonder why in the public toilets at shopping malls and offices the toilet paper dispensers are usually these little miniature Fort Knox contraptions only accessible using a key? You probably haven’t given it a lot of thought. But come on, I mean it’s hardly precious gems we’re talking about here, it’s bog roll for god’s sake.
It’s because toilet paper theft is a thing. Really.
Yes, people will actually pilfer this stuff, and risk the embarrassment of being caught with a handbag stuffed with cheap ass wipe rather than obtain said ass wipe the legitimate way. Why would people steal this one-ply, sphincter-shredding sandpaper instead of buying scented four-ply woven on crystal looms by the gods’-own handmaidens? I suppose there are a minority who face the unfortunate necessity of deciding whether to spend money on food or toilet paper not both. To them I say, thieve away. Hell, I’d buy a six pack of four-ply for anyone facing this predicament. But the reason, for the most part, is because people are, by and large, cheapskates.
Think about it. I’ve seen office workers go to extraordinary lengths to avoid paying for parking. I’m talking parking their cars kilometres from where they work, manhandling a bicycle out of the trunk, and pedalling the rest of the way. Or driving around for hours scouring entire neighbourhoods for that one hundred-yard lane where the local council hasn’t yet erected "No Parking" signs or installed parking meters. Seriously, this is not speculation. I have witnessed this.
What makes this sort of cheap behaviour even more worthy of arrogant ridicule and comedic scorn is that I have then seen these same people not bat an eyelid at the thought of then spending fifty bucks a week on takeaway coffee. And, being the deep thinker I am, I wondered why this was. The psychology behind it. What makes me contemplate this stuff is the same thing that drove me to study a Bachelor of Psychology that now sits useless in a drawer because I’m not a psychologist: human behaviour. But not philosophical nonsense like what drives man to murder fellow man or the intricate complexity of grief. No, no, no. What I wonder about is why the freakin' hell people steal toilet paper rather than buy it. Like I said, you’re dealing with an incredibly deep thinker here.
In order to answer that question you have to figure out why we are cheapskates.
It’s because we’re hunter-gatherer mammals, not store-for-the-winter insects. We think in the here and now. So the answer is quite simple: periodic payments versus lump sums. The entire credit card and home lending system is based on one simple idea: that people can generally be convinced to part with massive amounts of their hard earned if you convince them to do it in small amounts, regularly, instead of trying to convince them to give you a huge amount right away. It can in fact be very lucrative. There’s a reason the CEOs of banks don’t generally go putt-putting around in 1986 Ford Meteors.
Think about this: if I turned to you one afternoon and asked if you could spot me a dollar to go feed the parking meter you’d probably hand it over. But if I asked you for two hundred dollars to go buy a new pair of shoes you’d probably frown at me until I went away. And if, the following fortnight, I hit you up for another dollar you’d most likely give it to me again. And then next month I ask again. No problem, here you go. If I kept this up over a period of five years, periodically asking you for a dollar, there’s a very good chance I’d end up swindling that two hundred bucks out of you and you’d be none the wiser, never realising that was actually my plan all along. Sure, I’d have to wait for my new pair of Hush Puppies, but the end result is, you’re out two hundred bucks and I’m walking around on comfy insoles you paid for.
Think about it another way. The phone outlet at the local shopping plaza doesn’t ask you for eight-hundred bucks for a brand new iPhone. They will more likely ask you for something like seven dollars a week over two years. Because psychologically, seven dollars a week sounds like nothing, especially if you’re earning sixty grand a year or more. They will even try cranking in little mind-screws like telling you seven bucks a week is indeed nothing – “hell, mate, you spend more than that on coffee”. The end result is the same: the phone company gets your eight-hundred bucks. The bonus for them is that in two years you’re probably going to buy a new phone anyway and do the same thing all over again, all the while thinking you’re swindling them. A phrase that comes to mind every time I feel tempted by some Deal of the Week is something a used car salesman said to me once: the key to being a successful salesman is “always make the customer feel like he’s ripping you off”. Sales methods differ, but transactions generally don’t.
Companies pay ‘consultants’ big bucks to dream up new and inventive ways of making you feel like you’re not losing money, you’re ‘saving’ it. It’s a mentality largely unchanged since the dawn of commerce: traders must make consumers part with money, they all do it, it’s just that some do it far more successfully than others. When you make a transaction, whether it’s for a four-bedroom home or a pack of gum, you are by definition not saving anything. If I give someone five bucks when they’ve asked for ten I’m still losing five bucks. The notion that I’ve somehow ‘saved’ five dollars in that transaction is as ridiculous as me saying I saved your life by shooting you in the leg rather than in the head. The only way to truly ‘save’ money is not to spend it at all.
Obviously this is not practical. We all need to eat. We need roofs over our heads and cars to get the kids to school. Commerce is an essential part of society and economies would collapse if everyone literally saved every penny they earned. We have to buy stuff.
The thing is, somewhere along the way, traders cottoned onto something – the idea that if they could convince Joe to give them small amounts of cash periodically over a long period, they could also screw a little more out of him while they were at it. Thus the concept of interest was born. Interest is essentially this: that nice altruistic bank is doing you a favour by giving you a home and only making you pay them a small amount every month, so you need to reward them for that kindness. You need to give them something extra and it’s only a small amount per month and the trade-off is you get to own a home. But home ‘ownership’ is a misnomer. What a home loan is essentially is the bank buying the house and leasing it back to you. Miss a few payments and you’ll find out pretty quickly you don’t own much of anything.
Logically, it would seem far more beneficial for the bank if someone just paid for the house outright, some millionaire shows up with a briefcase full of hundred dollar bills and just hands it over. Deal done. You’d think the bank would prefer this, and why the hell wouldn’t they? It’s because if they sell it to Mr Fancy Briefcase right then and there, they only walk away with three-hundred thousand dollars. If, however, they sell it to Mr and Mrs Joe Mortgage at thirteen percent interest they may potentially end up with double that amount. It’ll take thirty years, but that’s irrelevant. The end result is the same. If I sell fifty items in one day for a thousand dollars each, I’ll paddle away in a pretty nice fishing boat. If I sell fifty items for a thousand dollars each at ten percent interest over thirty years I'll sail away on a yacht. Try paying off a student or car loan early. It seems simple, but they make it complicated, because they don’t really want you to pay it off early. It’s nice to get the money early and to be fair, banks do reward this. But if everyone started doing it, banks’ profit margins would collapse because interest is what gives them a profit margin in the first place.
I’m not arguing for a collapse of commerce as we know it. What I’d like to see is more transparency. I should be able to quickly see how much that three-hundred thousand dollar home is actually going to cost me over thirty years rather than having to pay an accountant to tell me. I should be able to see it on the real estate website alongside the telephoto-lens pictures of the ‘cosy’ living room and the energy efficient pergola for all the entertaining I’m never going to do. If the end result, bottom-line dollar amount is the same what the hell does it matter?
It matters because I’m far less likely to keep reading a half-a-million dollar listing for a four-bedroom home if it says that home is actually going to cost me a million dollars. If I can be convinced that that same four bedroom home will only cost me five hundred thousand dollars and I can pay that off at a couple thousand bucks a month over thirty years, I’ll keep clicking on through to “Make an Offer”. My brain won’t immediately jump to the million-dollar conclusion. The human brain is not hard-wired to think in thirty-year blocks of time, our hunter-gatherer instincts still have not evolved beyond hunting the next meal. The meal we’ll need to hunt in thirty years is irrelevant. By the time I really understand that I’m losing money rather than saving it, I’ve signed on the dotted line.
It’s the same with the phone. In the moment, standing there at the counter, I only see the seven dollars a week. The eight-hundred dollars total is twenty-four months away. The cup of steaming coffee with the little leaf pattern in the chocolate dust on top is only three bucks on a single Tuesday. The ninety dollars it will have cost me over thirty Tuesdays is an abstract concept and the human brain discards abstract concepts because they are not relevant to our day-to-day survival. That’s why people who major in Philosophy don’t generally rocket to the top of the corporate ladder. What matters is what I need now. I need coffee now. I need a roof over my head now. I need to take the kids to school now. What I’ll need in ten, thirty, a hundred, or ten thousand days is a far less tangible concept and thus far harder to quantify in real terms, terms that matter when I’m deciding whether to pull my money out of my wallet or not.
Does that really explain rampant toilet paper thievery? Probably not. It’s probably just as simple as why pay for something when I can just take it? And I’m sure getting that backpack full of one-ply sandpaper home without being caught feels pretty good, makes that cheap son of a bitch feel like he’s approaching downright Mission Impossible-levels of daring and deviance, even. But he’s not the real genius. No sir. Not even close. The real genius is whoever invented those Fort Knox toilet paper dispensers. I’ve seen hotel safes that are less secure than those goddamn things. And that same genius probably then hocked them to shopping malls and office towers on no-money-down instalment plans, no less. And I’d wager he doesn’t putt-putt around in a 1986 Meteor either.
