Scrutable

A friend posted a link on Facebook to this company. They make (mostly) toilet paper, with 50% of their profits going to build toilets in places that don't have them.

This looks great, but I wonder how much money this actually generates. The bog paper (3-ply) costs about €1 per roll, and the rolls are "double length" (370-400 sheets). But ordinary 3-ply rolls from Lidl cost about €0.25 each, so even doubling for length means that the toilet-building stuff costs about twice as much. So instead of buying 48 rolls for €44-€48, of which "half the profits" (whatever that means) go to a good cause, I could buy the same amount of paper for ~€25 and give ~€20 to charity myself. I'm going to guess that the profit margin isn't 90%, so 50% of the profit on a €48 order isn't going to get close to that €20.

On the other hand, if I did buy the cheaper stuff, maybe I wouldn't give the money to charity. It's not obvious to say "I'm going to switch shops/brands and give the difference away". And I'm certainly don't want to be That Hyper-Rational Guy who tells the well-meaning people who are about to order the expensive (made in China, if that matters to people who worry about local employment; but apparently transported in a carbon-neutral way...) paper that they could do so much better if they just did boring shopping and gave the money themselves.

So, bit of a dilemma overall. On the one hand, something is better than nothing; on the other, the kinds of people who can afford to spend a Euro on a bog roll, even a double-length one, are probably just the kinds of people where it would make a big difference if we could get them to see charitable giving in a rational light, rather than the "give your arse a super-soft experience and help poor people" way. I am also becoming uncomfortably aware of multiple bits of my own hypocrisy in even discussing this.

The company doesn’t just build toilets. If they had that might have been pointless. But they do fund organisations working on providing sanitation and clean water. Which is good.

But they don’t publish any accounts so we don’t know how their income is spent. The closest they get is a letter from an accountant confirming that they donated 50% of their after tax profits. That’s all well but a company can spend lots of money on salaries and perks.

So I’m skeptical overall due to their lack of transparency.

Woodchopper wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2021 11:01 pm So I’m skeptical overall due to their lack of transparency.

Yeah. But I'm enough of a curmudgeon already. I might have a quiet word about it with my friend IRL next time I see her; she's amenable to this kind of discussion and it will be much less awkward if not written down.

There's a similar paradox with food banks. You can buy a lot more food by giving £5 to Trussell Trust then putting it through the till at Tesco, but a lot of people actually do want to make the physical gift of food rather than donating money, so the net amount collected may actually be higher if you allow multiple forms of donation and don't try to optimise it. So maybe more toilets (etc) get built this way because the people who would donate the €10 or €20 they saved at Lidl are not the same people who want to buy fancy charity paper.