As A Newfoundland owner, one of your greatest assets is paper towels. Sometimes what you clean up necessitates a disposable product. Especially when you are showing or just traveling, paper towels can be a high-value asset. This has been a topic of discussion among Newf owners periodically, particularly about the value of Bounty paper towels. Having Newfs for several decades, I have watched as these towels emerged, improved, then began the decline cycle – inevitable when companies employ cost-decrease measures to resist raising their prices. And occasionally there have been times when I pulled out a roll from a travel or camping supplies box that was several years old and compared the old version to the new one. Each time, I sighed and said nothing, used the old roll like a parting companion and accepted the fate. The wonderful thickness and absorbency characteristics that we have come to expect since its introduction have diminished, and what is produced now doesn’t feel that much different than other brands of paper towels, unless perhaps you aren’t familiar with the original version. The drift becomes intolerable and possibly inevitable at some point. I thought it had reached this point a year or two ago, but now there is the version produced today. I have felt like writing a eulogy several different times. It’s not hard to imagine a set of animated pall-bearers carrying a super-sized roll of the earlier version of Select-a-Size towels.
After the pandemic, amid the major shortages in manufacturing resources and the subsequent shortages in paper products, retaining quality within a reasonable price was a fainting hope. Then the economy version of Bounty was introduced, Bounty Essentials. That may have been a consumer acceptance test that led to the current changes, because Bounty paper towels today are very similar to the Bounty Essentials. Some of the cumulative changes are:
1. The thickness of the sheet
2. The texture of the sheet, as though the fibers had been manufactured like a high-quality
cotton terry robe
3. The size of the diamond imprint pattern
4. The reliability of the performation (improves and disimproves, and tends to increase overuse
and waste)
5. Overall absorbency
6. Quantity I’ve been suspicious but never counted the sheets on a roll, but there is now a
class action lawsuit about misrepresentation of the number of sheets in a large package
A positive change was the development of the Select-a-Size sheets. Long before then, I was ripping the sheets in half. Too many times a disposable sheet was needed but a full sheet was a waste.
The latest version showed up at a local Sam’s, so I began buying from Walmart and occasionally from Lowe’s. Then the latest version was the version sold at our local Walmart, and finally at Lowe’s. In Albuquerque, the older version was still being sold at Costco, but I suppose that is just a matter of time also. If the change hasn’t arrived at your area yet, be prepared. It’s time for me to review some brand-shopping again, after about 40 years, although the possibility exists that all products have been cost-reduced under the current threat of economic circumstances.
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