Never run out of toilet paper unexpectedly again, thanks to the power of fluorescent-green toilet paper rolls!

The Issue:

It can be easy to run out of certain household consumables without realizing it. For example, a person may think they have six more rolls of toilet paper, but they’re actually using the last one. It can be quite annoying to run out unexpectedly!

This impacts many categories of product: soap, dental floss, paper towels, shampoo, etc.

Proposal:

Perhaps the very LAST little bit of a product should be obviously distinct in some way (Figure 1), so that every time the person uses it, they think “oh yeah, I really need to buy more of this!”

Fig. 1: Here, the last few yards of this dental floss is colored green/yellow, so the user will have ample warning before they’re out of floss. Similarly, the final toilet paper roll in a pack of 12 could be colored bright green, so a person would realize that it was time to buy more.

This could be used for all sorts of products: the idea is to essentially create an “emergency reserve” of a product so that a user still has time to refill it before they really need it (Figure 2).

For something like an important medication, a bottle of pills could have a tiny plastic pouch containing a few pills bundled with a note that says “These are the last ones! Reorder them!”

Fig. 2: Normally, a person might unexpectedly run out of contact lenses while thinking that they had another box worth. But with these special yellow/green boxes, the user would realize that they were nearly out. (Maybe the lenses could even be slightly tinted green or something, so the user would constantly be reminded to get more as they went about their normal day. Although that would be extremely annoying!)

PROS: Makes it easy to remember to re-order / re-purchase various products, thus ensuring that a person won’t run out at an inconvenient time.

CONS: None!

Originally published 2025-06-23.