 Hello, I'm Mark Thornton and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. In this episode, we look back at a previous episode about toilet paper. This episode aired in early March of this year and it covered the issue of very high toilet paper prices in the United States and elsewhere. In that episode, we discussed things like the Federal Reserve's inflation impact on toilet paper prices as well as softness in home construction in 2022 as contributing to supply side restrictions. We also hazarded a guess that toilet paper prices along with paper towels and other paper products would probably decline over the next year or so. Since that time, especially in the first half of 2023, stories in the news complained about the high prices of toilet paper and that toilet paper was expensive. It wasn't really until June of this year that there was a single story about a retailer who was cutting back on toilet paper prices in order to spur on sales in the UK. In the last couple of months, there's been almost no news about toilet paper prices. The only thing that I've seen is improved availability in the stores for toilet paper that prices have been stable and that in the wholesale market, allocations which developed in 2022 that limited wholesale buyers are now non-binding. In other words, they can order more than their allocations from the manufacturer. So what's happened in the meantime? Well, housing starts are up over 15% in recent months, which means they have to use more lumber, which means they have to cut down more trees, which means there's more raw product for things like paper towels and toilet paper. Since January of this year, the wholesale price of the raw materials for paper products has declined by almost 20%. In my own personal source of information regarding the wholesale price of shipping boxes indicates that those prices are already down 4% for typical size boxes. So while I don't have great prices for toilet paper and paper towel products at the retail level at this point, what we see is that economic conditions of supply in terms of the impact of the housing market and construction and demand in the sense of the decreased use of Amazon and other online retailers shrinking demand naturally leads to a fall in the price of the raw materials. And we suspect that those falling prices will impact the retail market in the near future. There are no news items that I found online in terms of falling prices for toilet paper and paper towels, but we suspect that unless media bias is present here that we should soon expect stories about falling prices of things like paper towels, toilet paper. That won't completely buck the trend towards higher prices in general, but it's a silver lining that is a result of a dependable market process.