Toilet Paper Won Before Bidets Arrived

A Toto Washlet S550e costs $800, a Brondell Swash 1400 runs $600. Less than 5% of American households own one.

These are genuine appliances with genuine engineering—heated seats, adjustable spray patterns, air-dry cycles, some with integrated bidets that replace the entire toilet seat. They work, and the hygiene math is straightforward.

Yet Americans still buy toilet paper instead. This statistic has not moved significantly in over a century, despite three distinct waves of manufacturers trying to solve what they believed was a product problem. The first wave arrived in the 1920s, when French and Italian bidets entered American luxury markets as sophisticated European imports. They failed.

The second came in the 1960s and '70s, when American companies repositioned bidets as modern, space-saving, hygienic necessities—modernization repackaged as progress. They failed again. We are now in the third wave. Began around 2010 and accelerated through the pandemic, when manufacturers stopped selling cleanliness and started selling technology itself. App connectivity, heated water, pulsing modes. The latest iteration treats the bidet as a smart-home product problem rather than what it actually is.

By the time bidets arrived with their superior features, toilet paper had stopped being a product choice and become part of how Americans understood cleanliness itself.

In 1978, the American toilet paper industry faced genuine competition for the first time in decades. Rather than fight toilet paper directly, bidet manufacturers tried to out-innovate it—more features, better design, smarter engineering. What they missed was that toilet paper had already won, not because it worked better. Because Americans had organized an entire bathroom culture around it. The decision was already baked into architecture, into plumbing sequences, into the basic infrastructure of the home.

The third wave is making the same error. Toto and Brondell are still treating this as a problem engineering can solve. What changed, and what might break the pattern this time, is not the bidet. It is whether Americans begin to see toilet paper itself as a choice rather than a given. That shift has nothing to do with spray pressure or water temperature.