The litmus test for the quality of life in the United States

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

With all the Lefties, pre- and post-election, saying they will leave the United States, I’ll suggest they may want to take some tissue with them.  

I have been in the paper industry for 50 years, starting in the tissue segment, which includes toilet paper (or bath tissue, if you prefer a more delicate term). Bath tissue is the first “luxury” for third world countries, only tied in some surveys with underwear as the first step on the way out of abject poverty.

Tissue (toilet paper, facial tissue and kitchen roll towels) is the basic marker indicating the quality of life where you live. At the forecast of severe weather, the first shelves stripped bare in the stores are milk, bread and bath tissue. By the way, if the disruptive threat is from overseas, such as the recent port strike, don’t worry, at least for a while, for we make all our tissue products here, but much of it from imported pulp.

So, how do I establish my claim? I only have to google: “In 2018 [latest year listed] North Americans consumed an average of 56 pounds of tissue per person. Africa and Far East Asia consumed around two pounds per person. The global average tissue consumption per capita was 11 pounds per year.”

Why focus on tissue as a measure of quality of life? It is simple. One can find any number of data points on the quality of life at the top of the economic ladder – expensive houses, glamorous automobiles, exotic locations and so forth. Those things are always consumed by a select and tiny minority in any location – they do not reflect the overall prosperity of a region.

It is like one time when I was going to an important job interview. I had my mentor go over everything I would wear, from socks to shoes to clothes and so forth (and how I would cut my hair). When it came to watches, he mentioned a fairly inexpensive watch from a well-known company. And he stopped there.  

He said when it comes to watches, you can never outspend the status seekers. Watches (at the time) peaked at around $50,000 (this was nearly 40 years ago). His point was you can never come close so don’t even try. Simple, unobtrusive and no strain to join the crazed status ranks.

Thus, I measure secular quality of life at the bottom of the “food chain,” focusing on highly desired products – tissue – that require just a small income.

There is one appliance that can skew the use of tissue products toward lower consumption. That appliance is the bidet. In Japan, 79% of the houses have a bidet. This is due to their cleanliness culture. 

In Italy, 75% of the houses have bidets because they passed a law in 1975 that all new houses must have bidets installed. The U.S. could have picked up on this trend with the housing boom after World War II, but GIs had seen these in use in brothels when overseas and apparently did not want to be reminded of their past indiscretions when they returned home.

Which brings us back to Highland County. Remember those large steel “drums” that passed through the county several years ago? They were headed to the then-new Sofidel tissue mill in Circleville. Sofidel is an Italian tissue company. They are now expanding that mill and have bought several others. Perhaps they saw the writing on the wall and decided to come to the relatively bidet-less United States.

Sometimes my columns end up in places I did not imagine when I started…

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.