Wretched Excess?

If you read, watch or listen to the news these days, you will eventually get to hear a lot of stories about wretched excess, whether it’s $40 bottles of mineral water, $1,600 bottles of scotch, or $1.2 million cars – although I still like the story about the gold-plated sinks and toilets the best. There was a news story this week that may have taken this concept to a new limit, though: cashmere toilet paper…

A story posted on The Consumerist website led me to this press release site, where you can read more about this revolutionary new concept, assuming you still want to. Now, before you go off having some extreme reaction, please note that the press release specifies “extract of cashmere” rather than actual fabric; apparently it’s some sort of chemical extract (similar to aloe vera or jojoba) that is supposed to make the product more comfortable to use. It’s really only “cashmere” by courtesy; there’s just enough cashmere materials included to allow for marketing it under that name. The product is more expensive than bargain-brand equivalents, but not actually that much more expensive than the premium brands in the product category; unless there is something special about its performance, it’s really nothing more than a marketing stunt…

Which does not change the fact, however, that it’s a super-luxury brand of toilet tissue – at best, an absurd concept, and at worst an example of excess, although perhaps not quite as wretched as you might have initially thought. One can only wonder if purchasing such a product would confer status on the consumer (“Look, Helen! The Johnsons are using cashmere toilet paper! How are we ever going to top THAT?”) or provide an advantage in social situations (“I bought the cashmere toilet tissue because I knew YOU were coming over, baby!”). Would it be possible to market super-premium versions of other household products not normally offered in a luxury configuration? Could you offer mink toothbrushes? Solid gold soap dishes? Diamond toilet brushes? Platinum-plated, jewel-encrusted loofas? Should you just give up and start buying luxury-grade knitwear, for towels and washcloths, if not actual toilet tissue?

I kid, of course, but while this sort of product is undoubtedly good for business for whatever sort of store sells cashmere toilet paper (assuming that anyone actually buys such a thing), it does raise some serious issues about the wider civilization in which this commerce is occurring – such as: have we all gone completely out of our tiny little minds? In a world where you could feed a child in a third-world country for a month on what the crystal-encrusted bottle of spring water would cost, how do you rationalize spending that much extra on a product that you’re literally going to flush the moment you’re done with it? Even allowing for its obvious contribution to the supply of low-hanging comedy fruit for Internet humorists, can we as a society really continue doing things like this?

Of course, social commentary about wretched excess has been around for millennia, and there’s no reason to believe that it has ever actually been responsible for bringing down an entire civilization. But, on the other hand, if this is the exception that proves the rule, remember, you heard it hear first, folks...