As many as ten million hotel bathrooms are cleaned each and every day, and in a significant portion, cleaning staff are required to fold the toilet paper roll, assuring guests that the bathroom is clean and ready to use. In more ritzy hotels, staff even leave behind elaborate, artistic designs. Ljung questions how necessary this task really is.1. You're not entitled to ask whether it's "defendable". The fancy hotels know that their customers like it. If their customers didn't like it, they'd stop doing it. Hotel management is sensitive to feedback. Researchers are not.
"Is it really defendable and appropriate that someone else has spent time on folding the toilet paper you are just about to use?" he writes.
Recognizing this wasted work, Ljung estimated how much time is spent folding toilet paper in hotels each and every year. Recruiting his two kids as co-authors ... Ljung clocked sixty attempts to fold a basic toilet paper design (shown below). The average folding time was 5.73 seconds. Ljung then multiplied that time by an estimate of the number of hotel cleanings performed each day to approximate the number of hours hotel staff all over the world spend folding toilet paper each year. The range was 3.8 million to 14.2 million hours!
Labels: Carbon Cult
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