After seeing the umpteenth report like this, Paul Farhi of the Washington Post was inspired to do some investigating. He found that while bread and milk are indeed the #1 and #2 items sold pre-storm, toilet paper doesn't even rank in the top fifty [1]. His guess is that most people already have ample supplies of toilet paper, plenty to see them through a few snowy days. Not so with bread and milk.
Why, then, is toilet paper always included in the report filmed at the local supermarket as the first flakes fall? He first speculates that with snow on the mind, there's an unconscious tendency to focus on white things in the store. But then he wonders -- why think of toilet paper and not, say, eggs? Another possibility is that toilet paper represents a "talisman of civilization, a minimal luxury and comfort when the normal rhythms of civilization are disrupted." But, he counters, "Scotch, chocolate and a good steak are pretty good minimal luxuries" -- but those hardly ever get mentioned.
Most respectable reporters wouldn't touch this story with a ten-foot plunger. So we tip our toilet seats to Mr. Farhi both for pursuing it and for his insightful analysis. However, being poop professionals, we at PoopReport should be able to run circles around him in generating explanations for why TV news habitually and erroneously includes toilet paper in their storm's-a-comin' stories.
For example, here's a banal possibility. Before rushing off to the store, people do check their supply of toilet paper -- because peeling that last stubborn square off the final roll has to be one of our worst cupboards-are-bare fears. Thus it is indeed on the storm shoppers' minds -- it's just that most of them already have plenty. On their way to the filming, the news yokels do a mental check of what they would make sure to have on hand. Milk, bread, and toilet paper come to mind. Naively assuming that those are the same things that get bought in volume, they shoot their story accordingly.
I'll bet Dave can churn out a more interesting account based on his claim that the news media can't report poop-related stories without pickling them in a brine of juvenile humor and corny puns [2]. (Corny, get it?) At the risk of earning a D, I'll take a shot at anticipating his argument. The press ordinarily operates on the notion that to make a poop story palatable, they must poke fun at it and trivialize it. But the opposite is also true. To spice up a boring story and give it a quirky, human touch, they just toss in a little gratuitous poop or toilet paper -- and voilà. This is the Salisbury steak theory of news -- regardless of the quality of the meat, it comes out tasting pretty much the same.
I trust that the PoopReport squad can generate a bowl-clogging clutch of explanations.
