It feels like 2020 was just yesterday, with hordes of Americans rushing to the nearest store in order to secure the most essential item in the country’s household: a month’s worth of toilet paper.
These may be distant memories now, but they are all coming to light as a new toilet paper crisis hits an already embattled market, that of the hardcore, toxic extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov.
This time around, people are faced with a mirror situation: there is too much toilet paper to go around despite the city of Tarkov being completely closed off, and that has cratered the prices of toilet paper rolls in Russia’s hottest virtual spot.
Basic supplies are always scarce in Escape From Tarkov, and the game’s traders make sure to drive this point home by constantly badgering you to find all sorts of garbage left behind after the contract wars kicked off.
While toilet paper has never exactly been high on the list of priorities (which raises a lot of questions about the hygiene standards in the city, but that’s for another day), the player-to-player economy has generally respected the value of keeping your parts clean after a deuce.
‘He Airdropped It? Dump It’
Thanks to the market analysts at Tarkov.dev, you can get a good view of Escape From Tarkov’s toilet paper economy before the Great Paper Crash of 2026. As you can see, toilet paper prices were more volatile than Bitcoin, with pre-crash highs of almost 60,000 roubles and lows around 10,000. On Wednesday, March 26th, everything would change.
The Airdrops event, ongoing since March 19th, had previously brought vaseline tins and single-shot thermobaric rocket launchers to Tarkov. Now, the market manipulators outside of the city have started dropping crates full of toilet paper.
There is too much toilet paper to go around despite the city of Tarkov being completely closed off
While we cannot speak on the immediate effects of this on the cleanliness of the mercenaries and scavengers stranded in the Norvinsk region, the market implications of such a flood are clear.
Once a useful commodity, toilet paper has now been banalized, as tons of the white stuff rain down as part of medical supply packages. Since March 26th, the price of toilet paper in the Escape From Tarkov flea market has constantly stayed below 10,000, and even dipped below the direct sale price to traders when accounting for the listing fees.
What comes next is anyone’s guess. The toilet paper airdrops are bound to stop sometime in the near future, but can the market recover? Some say you should buy the dip and hold until toilet paper prices shoot up. Others think that is an idiotic move since you will lose all your stash space that could fit more useful things like body armor and ammo. Whatever the future holds, I hope it is the last toilet paper crisis I will witness in my lifetime.
