Hotel toiletries

Where luxury hotels are concerned, they do their best to supply as many comforts as possible to the guests who check-in. Therefore all the amenities — from bottled water, hair-dryer, sewing kit and shower cap, to stuff like shampoo, conditioner, et al, are provided, so that our stay is an extremely comfortable one.

Most of us understand that these things are for our consumption and we are not supposed to pack the electric kettle, blankets, pillows or the coffee machine to bring back home. But for the ones who do not get it, sometimes the management places notes like “if you like the bathrobe and want to purchase it, the cost of $500 would be added to your bill” as a deterrent. The over inflated price of the garment usually scares whoever entertains any thoughts of filching it.

But the toiletries, now those are a different story altogether. Many folks do not consider picking up soaps, bath-gels, body lotions, and dental-kit and so on, as outright stealing. In their heads they justify it as a consumable freebee, included in the room tariff, and try to use as much of it as possible in the duration of their stay and the rest, if not discarded, is gathered together and brought to their houses. 

However, there are people who like to collect them and there is one person I know, who hoards them in large quantities. In his own words, he confesses that as soon as he books a room in a hotel, he invariably requests for extra toiletries. And the moment he sees them displayed in the bathroom, he packs them up immediately and calls the housekeeping staff to replenish them at once. Once they do that, he stores them away in his suitcase too.

In this manner, he keeps stashing loads of them till his departure, when his luggage almost reaches bursting point. There are also times he has to pay excess baggage if the airline weight allowance has exceeded the required limit. And the best part is that after making all this effort of bringing the loot home, he does not even use them, because he is partial to a particular brand of toiletries that he buys from someplace else!

He supposedly has bins upon bins of them — not your polite kitchen-sized containers, but ones big enough to store the family Christmas tree. They are stacked more than four feet high in his walk-in closet. Inside are hundreds and hundreds of shampoos, conditioners, lotions and potions of all makes, plus makeup remover wipes, shower caps, sewing kits, mouthwash, tiny bags of cotton balls, and even the odd shoehorn and pairs of monogrammed hotel slippers!

I don’t think he is alone in his obsession because a recent study found 24 per cent of respondents admitting to accumulating hotel toiletries. Researchers looking into the link between genetics and hoarding have discovered gene patterns similar in hoarders versus non-hoarders. 

But there are limits to how much you can hoard so when my hoarder friend ran out of space to stash his additional boxes of toiletry, it was time to tame the habit. 

“I have a present for you,” he announced the minute I entered his house. 

“What?” I looked suspiciously at the goody bag in his hand.

“One dozen bottles of miniature shampoo,” he beamed. 

“Why?” I exclaimed.

“You can use it as hand soap,” he explained. 

“Why?” I repeated. 

“Or for dishwashing or window cleaning,” he improvised.