Shitty One-Ply

I used to have a friend at Ithaca College who would go on about the sad unfairness of one-ply toilet paper. While all the student dorms and the bathrooms the students used were stocked with one-ply, dry and scratchy and irritating and easily ripped, all the bathrooms in faculty areas had soft two-ply toilet paper. He used to point out how very unfair and classist this is.

I'd like to go beyond this Marxist rhetoric and speak instead to an even wider problem: the very existence of one-ply toilet paper. Why in the world do we need this product? Is there anyone out there who prefers what is universally known as a genuinely inferior product? Of course not. The only conceivable reason anyone would buy one-ply is because it's cheap (and, in the case of universities, the people who buy it won't be forced to sandpaper their asses on it). Imagine if factories only produced acceptable classes of toilet paper. I would be willing to bet that the greater efficiency involved in having fewer choices would ensure that the decent two-ply would cost as much as one-ply does now. This leaves me with the conclusion that one-ply exists only to justify the existence--and higher cost--of a separate, BETTER variety in two-(and multi-) ply toilet paper. We don't have shitty one-ply so we'll actually buy and use it. We have it so two-ply costs more when we actually do buy it.

This theory extends to other products. Take, for instance, optional packages on automobiles. For instance, optional passenger airbags. How many people are going to say, "No, thank you. I feel pretty confident that I'm not going to get into an accident, and if I do, I don't like my passengers all that well anyway."? This also applies to just about everything we can buy, from video games to operating systems to razors. So many of them are genuinely inferior products that it doesn't make sense to me not to offer just one product that's the very best it can be. Instead of having a $1000 and $2000 version of a computer, for example, can't we just only offer the very best at, say, $1400? The efficiency of only having to make one model would make it all the more worthwhile. What's wrong with letting everyone enjoy the very best of things? And nobody would have to put up with shitty one-ply toilet paper anyway.