18 Time June 20/June 27, 2022
mosT of The Things ThaT seemed
to disappear during the pandemic—the
toilet paper, the yeast, the flour—have
returned to shelves. Not so for products
used primarily by women, like baby
formula, hormone replacement therapy
(HRT) drugs used to treat symptoms
of menopause, and even tampons, es-
sential hygiene products to the roughly
40% of U.S. women who use them.
“What’s been going on for a couple
months is that organizations call us up
and say, ‘We need tampons,’ and we
go to our warehouse and there’s noth-
ing there,” says Dana Marlowe, the
founder of I Support the Girls, which
provides feminine products for peo-
ple experiencing homelessness. Her
group, which depends on donations,
has received half as many tampons
this year as during the same span last
year and 61% fewer than in 2020.
“To put it bluntly, tampons are
next to impossible to find,” says
Michelle Wolfe, a radio host in Boze-
man, Mont., who is one of the many
women to have vented on the internet
about the tampon shortage.
The companies that make tampons
say supply-chain issues are causing
the problem. Procter & Gamble, which
makes Tampax, America’s most popu-
lar tampon brand, is having trouble
sourcing raw materials for feminine-
care products and getting the fin-
ished products to retailers. Edgewell
Personal Care, which makes O.B. and
Playtex, experienced a severe staff
shortage at its Dover, Del., facility be-
cause of Omicron, the company says.
Tampons are Class II medical devices,
which means that because of quality-
control regulations, companies can’t
put just anybody on the assembly line,
so production lagged behind demand.
The raw materials that go into
tampons—cotton, rayon, and
sometimes pulp and plastic for
applicators—are also hard to find. This is the third straight
year that demand for cotton has exceeded production, says
Sheng Lu, a professor in the Department of Fashion and
Apparel Studies at the University of Delaware.Increased demand, staffIng shortages, raw-
material shortages—none of these factors is unique to tam-
pons. What makes this shortage particularly problematic
is that people who get their periods every month have to
keep buying tampons just as regularly. That steady demand
has allowed companies to raise prices. Overall, the price of
feminine-care products in the U.S. has risen 10.8% from a
year ago, according to scanner data from NielsenIQ, which
tracks prices from point-of-sale systems. “Tampons are a
staple product—a life necessity,” Lu says. Companies “will
consider more price increases for these necessity products.”
P&G posted its biggest sales gain in decades in the most
recent quarter, and the amount of money it made from
sales in its feminine- care division was up 10%.
One female CEO argues that it’s no coincidence that the
country and America’s big companies are mostly run by
people who don’t need to buy the products in question. The
CEOs of Procter & Gamble, Edgewell, and Unilever are men.
“I challenge you to go to a business that doesn’t have hand
sanitizer. That happened overnight,” says Thyme Sullivan,
who worked for 27 years at consumer packaged-goods com-
panies including PepsiCo and Nestle before co-founding
TOP the Organic Project, a menstrual-products company.
But there’s been no push to solve this supply problem, she
argues, because many of the people determining prices and
availability for feminine-care products do not use them.
“It is just a matter of who is asking for it. And who are the
decisionmakers,” she says. “It’s why we need to bring men
into the conversation, because in many places, they’re still
the decisionmakers, and this wasn’t on their radar.” RETAIL
The great
tampon shortage
of 2022
BY ALANA SEMUELS
10.8%
4.3%
Shelves at a CVS
in Croton-on-
Hudson, N.Y.,
are almost empty
of tampons
▽HOW MUCH THE
PRICE OF FEMININE-
CARE PRODUCTS
HAS RISEN FROM
A YEAR AGOTHE INCREASE IN
PRICE FOR ORAL-
HYGIENE PRODUCTS
OVER THE SAME
TIME SPANTHE BRIEF BUSINESS
ALANA SEMUELS