For the love of god- I can't understand why people buy paper towels. It makes zero sense. It's expensive, you throw it after a use. I started using cloth towels and life is so much better.

I don't use them frequently, but I love them for some things. In particular, my wife likes our cloths to look nice. This means wiping up something staining will make the cloths look worse. In those cases I pull out a paper towel. I could get black cloths to get around this, but she doesn't like those. So, here we are.

They're also useful when I need to use a harsh chemical that I don't want lingering on a household cloth my young kids might use on their bodies.

I've had the same roll for around a year, but it's almost exhausted. I think they're fine.

They're also very useful in a lab setting, but that's another matter.

Same here.

We stopped using toilet paper during covid, got a bidet, and bought a couple hundred shop towels to dry our butts. Now we only buy toilet paper for guests, which happens maybe once a year after throwing several parties.

Then we also bought shop towels for the kitchen to replace paper towels. I love the shop towels so much.

The butt-towels are white, and we wash them with bleach, there's been zero problems doing this over the last ~6 years. If there happens to be a bit of excess poop on a towel (typically there is none at all), we just throw it out, we have hundreds. The kitchen towels are blue, so we don't mix them up with the butt-towels.

We have laundry baskets for each kind of shop towel. A small one in the bathrooms, a larger one in the kitchen for the kitchen towels. We have to wash the butt-towels maybe once a month, and about the same for the kitchen towels. It's a simple chore that takes practically none of our time, less than it would to go out and buy paper. No, the butt-towels do not smell at all, they dry quickly and there's never been any problem whatsoever.

It's so much better than spending multiple $100s of dollars a year on paper that literally gets flushed down the toilet or goes into the trash.

A few of our friends took notice and started doing this too.

Honestly, I don't know why we ever wiped our butts with toilet paper for so many years, it's just so... shitty. It's just not a good experience. When we travel we miss our bidet and shop towels so much, to the point that I've ordered a cheap bidet if I'm staying in an Airbnb for a week or more, and install it there, and leave it behind. $30 well spent.