A toilet paper gauge. Completely serious.
The closet is full. Nobody is thinking about toilet paper.
One short episode every evening, plus a break-in whenever the reading jumps a band. Pick your door:
No account? The number lives right here on this page, free, no sign-up. It always will.
Things are normal. Stuff breaks somewhere in the world every day; none of it is near your house. Buy toilet paper when you run low, like always.
Something real happened, but it is far away or small. Worth knowing, not worth a trip. If you are at the store anyway, look at your shelf count when you get home. That is the whole assignment.
A few real things are stacking up at once. Nothing is about to run out. The advice is about your shelf, not the store's: if you are under two weeks at home, add one pack on your normal trip and put it in the closet. If you are already at two weeks, you are done, there is nothing to buy.
Disruption is close enough to plan around. Over the next few days, in normal trips, build up to about two weeks of the basics at home: toilet paper, meds, pet food, the stuff your house actually uses. No special run, no cart full of one thing. Already at two weeks? You are done. Two weeks is not our number; it is the standard Oregon and Wyoming emergency management publish ("Be 2 Weeks Ready"), and Wyoming's list names toilet paper.
Something local and physical is interrupting how goods move, like a regional disaster closing truck routes, and it is expected to last. If you are under two weeks, get there today if you can, then stop. If you are already there, you are done. More than that does not help your house, and it is how shelves actually empty.
One fact worth keeping: every US toilet paper shortage on record was a buying event, not a making event. The plants did not stop. The shopping did it. More than 99% of American toilet paper is made in America, a lot of it in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and it gets here by truck.
Three taps, and we size the two-week buffer for your actual house: what to add, roughly how much, and when to stop. It runs entirely on this page.
Answer all three and we will do the math for your house.
The desk watches rail, hospitals, power, water, banks, government, the internet, and the scam world, hour by hour, and cross-references what it finds before anything counts.
Confirmed hits on big systems move the meter most. Real freight trouble moves it. A port strike that toilet paper does not use does not. Rumors and gang claims barely move it, and can never push it past Side-Eye by themselves. Items fall off after 48 hours unless they are still going. Every reading shows its top drivers, up above. If you cannot see why it moved, we did the job wrong.
The meter never tells anyone to panic-buy. The worst reading it can give still only asks for a two-week buffer, bought gradually.