Patrick Spriggs, a student from Roseville, CA, included these photos in his reflection, “Toilet Paper Panic.” He describes how his family purchased commercial-sized toilet paper rolls after noticing the shortages for toilet paper in stores.

“Toilet Paper Panic,” March 3rd, 2021

One of my salient memories of the pandemic was the initial panicked rush to buy toilet paper. I mean…toilet paper? Really? Of all of the things that a person can buy during a world-wide emergency, I never imagined that toilet paper would be the one thing people would go crazy over… I was not immune to the gold rush for toilet paper in 2020. Finding the stuff was at some times all but impossible. Amazon was even sold out at times. At one point, my brother decided to search online and found an industrial connection. That’s right – we decided to buy the giant toilet paper rolls that you only find in public bathroom stalls. I could finally have that 7-11 gas station restroom experience right in my own home… The toilet paper boxes that arrived were almost comically large and heavy… We only had one problem at this point: how to use them. You see our bathroom does not actually have anything that can hold rolls of this size, so we had to improvise with some string and PVC piping… With this, our worries for toilet paper have become a thing of the past.