Disposable Diaper Sales Are Down. But Why?
According to AdvertisingAge, sales of disposable diapers were down 9% for the 52 weeks ending August 7, 2011. Meanwhile, the number of babies age two and under fell by only 3%, and sales of diaper rash creams increased by 2.8%. AdvertisingAge reasons that this means that parents are letting babies sit in dirty diapers longer in order to save money, and thus babies are having more problems with diaper rash.
I know, yuck, right? I suppose there could be a relationship there. However, my first thought was that there must be more people using cloth diapers now! That doesn’t account for the diaper rash creams (although some people think cloth-diapered babies are more prone to diaper rash), but I bet it’s a factor. If you glance at the comments below the article, you’ll see several other people casting doubt on the article’s conclusion as well.
If you really want to save money, cloth diapers are an excellent option. Even if you have to pay for a coin laundry, you’ll probably be saving money over disposables, which cost around a quarter for each diaper.
Photo by simplyla on Flickr, used via CC BY 2.0 Attribution 2.0 Generic.
This post has 4 comments
September 17th, 2011
You will save money… and the landfills won’t be full of plastic-wrapped, human feces, bacteria-laden, and just waiting to start some epidemic!
Interesting facts.
September 17th, 2011
My first thought would be that more people were buying cloth diapers too…. yay for cloth diapers!
September 19th, 2011
Cloth diapers was definitely my first thought too and I hope that is the case and not parents letting their kids sit in wet/dirty diapers to save money. How awful!!
December 5th, 2011
I cloth diapered 2 out of 3 of my kids. I was 18 years old when my first child was born and had no education about cloth diapers or even breastfeeding. With my 2nd and 3rd child I knew how I wanted to take care of them. So when my 2nd was about 5 months old, I had enough money saved to buy a weeks worth of cloth diapers for her bum. Of course I fell in love with them and couldn’t resist getting the cute fluff. Now that my 3rd is now potty trained, I have a TON of cloth to sell. Also I think cloth diapering has helped in the whole Potty Training dilemma that alot of parents go through with their kids.