A toilet paper factory has a long planning cycle and supply contracts, so it cannot react very fast to large changes in demand. The machinery also costs a lot, so they cannot increase the capacity for every spike in demand that will usually disappear in a few weeks. The weakest chain is the Wall Street pressure on these companies to "improve cash flow or else" that lead to reducing the stocks (product and raw materials alike) to minimum, so any surge is even harder to compensate. I worked in this area for some years, this is how it's done.
I don't like "gotcha" style discussions, but I admit I could have worded that more precisely.
What I meant is: There was no reduction in overall toilet paper production, and people didn't suddenly start to shit more. The shortage was mostly a distribution/packaging issue in the form of "not available in packaging X at location Y". Markets tend to solve that kind of problem incredibly quickly.
Very interesting, I guess my experience here in Germany was very different. No toilet paper anywhere for 2-3 weeks last March/April, and then suddenly supermarkets drowned in it.
Do you know if these are really meaningful shortages, or if businesses have just kept the signs up to make people feel taken care of?
I don't know for sure, but even with the max-1 purchase limit, the toilet paper section of the aisle is somewhat lightly stocked on some of my visits. (Of course, if you've told me for a year that TP is in short supply, you can bet that I have a lot of it on hand in the basement, so it's hard to get a clean read. "If there's space in the cart and TP on the shelf, why not pick one up? It's $10, never spoils, and never goes out of style.")
There were some interesting theories floating around about how everyone was home so the residential TP market demand jumped but the commercial demand fell.
