Pointing the (Greasy) Finger

Some years ago, late-night TV host Johnny Carson joked about a shortage of toilet paper. The audience laughed. But the next day, wildfire worries over a shortage of fundamental bathroom fibers caused millions of Americans to create a real T.P. shortage by grabbing every roll from store shelves and stockrooms. It took weeks to restore normal supplies.

Not to ignite a new paper panic, but have you noticed there are fewer paper napkins at your favorite fast-food place these days? Not that anyone patronizes fast-food emporiums anymore since the healthful-food craze and the American obesity quagmire developed.

If any messy eater forces you into a burger or chicken place on this holiday, take a look. It won’t affect the course of human history other than greasing up countless steering wheels and saving some trees, but the napkin shortage is real, intentional and revealing about American klepto-culture and the tiny corners that some businesses are cutting to curb costs.

It seems that many customers -- you know who you are -- grab a handful of napkins, use two and toss the others. Or maybe -- who knows, it could happen -- they stuff a wad of free napkins in a purse or pocket for car or home use. One survey found that nearly 45% of customers are paper pilferers. Same for those tiny envelopes of sweetener, ketchup and plastic cutlery. After all, paper napkins, first made in the 1930s as the love of ironing linen wrinkled, are out in the open; if they don’t want us to have them, why put any out?

With increasing costs and fast-food competition, however, many places no longer put free stuff out. They ration napkins at the counter. They award you one, force you to ask for more or, more cleverly, secure them in dispensers packed so densely that no tray-holders but the Flying Wallendas could conceivably wrestle out more than one or, more likely, a half of one. Napkins now are also smaller and thinner. Live with it.

Cutting costs has become a corporate mantra in recent years. Before indulging in illness, check your health benefits. And have you noticed more of those one-paper towel dispensers in restrooms? If an airline can save $40,000 by withholding one olive from each salad, imagine the savings from corporate paper parsimony.

Naturally, any napkin-saving scheme produces unintended consequences. How many millionaire-making ingenious ideas conceived over lunch will not be sketched out for pursuit back at the office? How many miles wasted by lost drivers without maps drawn on unavailable napkins?

Worse, imagine the phone numbers not exchanged by men and women, the dates unmade, proposals unknelt, marriages unconsummated, the children unborn and the Happy Meals unsold by fast-food places with napkin reserves won but, unhappily, sales lost.