Why

Why is it that not many hotels (if any) provide toothpaste? Even if it was a tiny single serve tube, it’d be something a lot of guests would find useful.

Look at the toothpaste purchasing profile for many households – often couples will often adapt their toothpaste consumption patterns to match each other, so by nature of this fact the aforementioned couple will typically purchase one tube of toothpaste for both people as part of their normal consumption pattern.

So when one member of this couple travels, they’re faced with a dilemma:

• Purchase a redundant tube of toothpaste – fairly redundant, and potentially inconvenient
• Take the toothpaste tube which has been designated for use by both members on the trip, risking potential fallout from the other member of the couple (and potentially other house members if your toothpaste sharing schemes extend this far - ymmv).
• Hope that a travel companion has bought a tube of toothpaste (higher percentage of this happening if the said travel companion is single / inconsiderate).
• For the traveller to attempt to clean their teeth without toothpaste, and hope that the residue on their brush will combine with water to produce some sort of cleansing lather.

All of this could be prevented if hotels simply provided toothpaste! Is there something specific to the production of single serve toothpaste compared to soaps and shampoo that I’m overlooking here? Or is it something to do with profiling toothpaste usage patterns which is eluding my consideration?

Someone enlighten me. Please!

 Print | Posted on Friday, September 25, 2009 11:11 PM |