Toothpaste & Communism

Today, we have a guest post from Melissa.

In the early 1990s, a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I lived in Budapest, Hungary, a recently Communist place which that was letting go of its collectivist ways. Some trappings remained. Few people owned property or cars, Hungarians were never on time, and product choices were few. When you went to the store to buy toothpaste (fogkrém), there was one brand, and that's what you bought. It seemed like a drag at the time, but wasn't important enough to complain about.

Things are different in the US in late 2009. On the toothpaste front, the number of choices is overwhelming to the point of mental paralysis. Go to the average big box store. You don't have to understand combinatorics to know that the numerous axes of choice produce a dizzying array. First you've got the brand: Colgate, Crest, Aim, and more. Then you've got paste vs. gel, whitening vs. not, tartar control vs. not, mouthwash/breath additives vs. not, spearmint vs. peppermint. Though not all possible combinations are represented, there are well over 50. This is just among the mainstream toothpastes. They don't easily differentiate by price, so I don't have that to go on. I've gone to Target with the goal of buying toothpaste, and, faced with more choices than I could handle at the end of a long workday, I've left without. This is madness. Choosing toothpaste should not be so hard.

To cut down on choices, I enlisted the aid of my dental hygienist. "Should I be getting all that tartar control, whitening & breath freshening?" In a word, no. According to Marcia, the whitening doesn't really work, breath freshener is a waste, and the tartar control is bad for your enamel if you don't have a tartar problem. So now I'm down to brand. If I go with the plain jane toothpaste, I still need a little help with 3 brands times 2 formats (gel vs. paste), but six is manageable. Especially if my friends can tell me what they like in some organized fashion. Without communists around to tell you what to do, friends are a good second choice.


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