Toilet Paper vs Kleenex - Which is Cheaper to Blow Your Nose?

Toilet Paper vs Kleenex – Which is Cheaper to Blow Your Nose?

Toilet Paper vs Kleenex – which is cheaper to blow your nose with? This is an article that I have been planning to research for 2+ years. I am now getting around to digging into this to answer the ultimate question! Well… maybe it isn’t the ultimate question, but I do really enjoy geeking out on this kind of thing to optimize our day-to-day expenses. My hypothesis is that toilet paper will be much cheaper than Kleenex – but I have never run the analysis. Join me as we go through some detailed calculations to determine if toilet paper or kleenex is cheaper for blowing your nose.

The Toilet Paper and Kleenex – The Contenders

I have selected four different contenders to run our calculations on for the toilet paper vs Kleenex analysis. All of these items and prices come from samsclub.com.

Competitor	Picture	Price
1) Member’s Mark Bath Tissue Ultra Premium		$15.86
2) Angel Soft PS – Premium Bathroom Tissue – Huge Box		$35.28
3) Kleenex Facial Tissue – 12pk		$14.98
4) Kleenex – Anti-Viral Facial Tissue – Huge Box		$64.38

The trick here is that these all come in different sizes. So, we need to convert the prices to the cost per sheet of paper. See the below where I break the cost per sheet down per toilet paper and Kleenex:

Competitor	Total Price	# Plys	# Sheets per Roll/Box	# Rolls/Box per Package	Total # of Sheets	Cost per Sheet
1) Member’s Mark Bath Tissue Ultra Premium	$15.86	2	220	45	9,900	$0.0016
2) Angel Soft PS – Premium Bathroom Tissue – Huge Box	$35.28	2	450	40	18,000	$0.0020
3) Kleenex Facial Tissue – 12pk	$14.98	2	160	12	1,920	$0.0078
4) Kleenex – Anti-Viral Facial Tissue – Huge Box	$64.38	3	68	27	1,836	$0.0351

As you can see, there are humongous price differences in the final cost per paper sheet. The Kleenex Anti-viral top-of-the-line stuff is almost 2,200% more expensive per sheet compared to mid-range toilet paper!!

To make sure we are not comparing apples-to-orange, we will need to make one more correction. Mainly – a sheet of Kleenex tissue is larger than one square of toilet paper. A normal person would use two to three sheets of toilet paper for every one Kleenex. Let’s move on where we take this into account and estimate how many sheets of each we will use per year of each.

How Many Sheets Will You Use a Year?

So, how many sheet of toilet paper or Kleenex will you use a year? I tried to estimate this in the table below for a family of four. I assumed a normal person would blow their nose twice a day on average and a bit more when then get sick. You can see the numbers below – it is quite a lot of sheet of toilet paper or Kleenex for an entire year.

Type of Material	# of Sheets per use	# of Uses per Day	# of Uses When Sick per Day	# of Times Sick per Year	# of Family Members	Total Sheets Used per Year
Toilet Paper	3	2	10	2	4	8,840
Kleenex	1	2	10	2	4	3,000

Now that we have a total number of sheets a family of four would use in a year, we can calculate the annual cost estimate of the four options above to answer the question: toilet paper vs Kleenex – which is cheaper to blow your nose?

Annual Cost Estimate

So to answer the age-old question of: “toilet paper vs Kleenex – which is cheaper to blow your nose?” we have compiled an annual cost estimate table below. As you can see, the toilet paper came in the cheapest. I was very surprised to find that the three ply Kleenex anti-viral tissue was more than $90 extra a year over the toilet paper! We need to ensure we definitely steer clear of this stuff unless we happen to inherit a small fortune at some point :-).

Competitor	# Plys	Total Sheets Used per Year	Cost per Sheet	Annual Cost
1) Member’s Mark Bath Tissue Ultra Premium	2	8,840	$0.0016	$14.16
2) Angel Soft PS – Premium Bathroom Tissue – Huge Box	2	8,840	$0.0020	$17.33
3) Kleenex Facial Tissue – 12pk	2	3,000	$0.0078	$23.41
4) Kleenex – Anti-Viral Facial Tissue – Huge Box	3	3,000	$0.0351	$105.20