Sarah and I have been intrigued by the unexpected popularity of Tide on food pantry shelves for some time. I’m beginning to find out.

The rapid disappearance of Tide from the shelves and the near-impossibility of replenishing it for any significant period are pressing issues. Some individuals even sacrifice foods to obtain Tide, a clear indication of its transcendent value that goes beyond its intended use.

No wonder, when it first came out, Tide was considered the coolest thing in the world, the same way the iPad was.

My research into Tide’s history has been eye-opening. The detergent’s passionate following can be traced back to 1946, a significant year just after the end of World War II. Proctor and Gamble’s release of Tide was a game-changer, and it remains the most popular detergent in the world, a testament to its enduring appeal.

No more rubbing on boards to get stains out. Below, I reprinted an excerpt from New York Magazine published in 2013 about how getting Tide is much more than cleaning clothes. It also helps me understand why keeping Tide on the Cambridge Pantry shelves is so hard.

We can get enough Tide to the pantry to allow them to stock some for more than a few days. I’ll also keep researching the history of this remarkable product. Tide has become a sign of success and positive child care. Some people think its smell has healing powers.

 

Tide Liquid Detergent, Hygienice Heavy Duty, Original Scent, 21 Loads, 34 Fl. Oz, $5.50.

Rice-A-Roni Dinner Classics, Variety Pack, 10 Piece Assortment, $16.50.

Corned  Beef Hash, Homestyle, 12 – 14 Oz Canned Food, $39.38.

 

 

From New York Magazine, 2013.

“The call that came in from a local Safeway one day in March 2011 was unlike any the Organized Retail Crime Unit of the Prince George’s County Police Department had fielded before. The grocery store, located in suburban Bowie, Maryland, had been robbed repeatedly.

But in every incident, the only products taken were bottles—many, many bottles—of the liquid laundry detergent Tide. “They were losing $10,000 to $15,000 a month, with people just taking it off the shelves,” recalls Sergeant Aubrey Thompson, who heads the team.

When Thompson and his officers arrived to investigate, they stumbled onto another apparent Tide theft in progress and busted two men who’d piled 100 or so of the bright orange jugs into their Honda. The next day, Thompson returned to the store’s parking lot to tape a television interview about the crimes. A different robber took advantage of the distraction to make off with twenty more bottles.

Later, Thompson reviewed weeks’ worth of Safeway’s security footage. He found that more than two dozen thieves, working in crews, were regularly raiding the store’s household products aisle, sometimes returning more than once the same day and avoiding detection by timing their heists to follow clerks’ shift changes.

Owners and managers of other area stores, having seen Thompson on the news, contacted him to report their own vanishing Tide bottles. Since then, the oddly brand-loyal crime wave has gone national, striking bodegas, supermarkets, and big-box discounters from Austin to West St. Paul, Minnesota.

In New York, employees at the Penn Station Duane Reade nabbed a man trying to abscond with Tide bottles he’d stuffed into a suitcase. In Orange County, an attempted Tide theft led to a high-speed chase that included the thief crashing his SUV into an ambulance. Last year, for the first time, detergent made the National Retail Federation’s list of most-targeted items. Joseph LaRocca, founder of the trade group RetailPartners, helped compile the report: “Tide was specifically called out.”

As the cases piled up after his team’s first Tide theft bust, Thompson sought an answer to the riddle at the center of the crimes: What did thieves want with so much laundry soap? To find out, he and his unit pored over security recordings to identify prolific perpetrators, whom officers then tracked down and detained for questioning. “We never promised to go easy on them, but they were willing to talk about it,” Thompson says. “I guess they were bragging.” It turned out the detergent wasn’t ­being used as an ingredient in some new recipe for getting high, but instead to buy drugs themselves.

Tide bottles have become ad hoc street currency, with a 150-ounce bottle going for either $5 cash or $10 worth of weed or crack cocaine. The detergent has earned a new nickname on certain corners: “Liquid gold.” The Tide people would never sanction that tagline, of course. But this unlikely black market would not have formed if they weren’t so good at pushing their product.

Shoppers have surprisingly strong feelings about laundry detergent. In a 2009 survey, Tide ranked in the top three brand names that consumers at all income levels were least likely to give up regardless of the recession, alongside Kraft and Coca-Cola. That loyalty has enabled its manufacturer, Procter & Gamble, to position the product in a way that defies economic trends.

At upwards of $20 per 150-ounce bottle, Tide costs about 50 percent more than the average liquid detergent yet outsells Gain, the closest competitor by market share (and another P&G product), by more than two to one. According to research firm SymphonyIRI Group, Tide is now a $1.7 billion business representing more than 30 percent of the liquid-detergent market.

Before the advent of liquid detergent, the average American, by one estimate, owned fewer than ten outfits. They wore items multiple times (to keep them from getting threadbare too fast) before scrubbing them by hand using bars of soap or ground-up flakes. To come up with a less laborious way to do the laundry, executives at Procter & Gamble began tinkering with compounds called surfactants that penetrate dirt and unbound it from a garment while keeping a spot on a shirt elbow from resettling on the leg of a pant.

When the company released Tide in 1946, it was greeted as revolutionary. “It took something that had been an age-old drudgery job and transformed it into something that was way easier and got better results,” says Davis Dyer, co-author of Rising Tide, which charts the brand’s origins. “It was cool, like the iPod of the day.” Procter & Gamble, naturally, patented its formula, forcing competitors to develop their surfactants. It took years for other companies to come up with effective alternatives.

While clothes were becoming more straightforward to clean, Americans were owning more of them. Today, journalist Elizabeth Cline reports in Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, the average U.S. consumer buys 68 pieces of clothing a year—more than one purchase a week—much of it cheaply made. Launder those items with Tide, and they take on a uniform smell and feel that consumers have come to associate with quality.

“It doesn’t matter where the clothes come from if you wash them with Tide, they do have almost this prestige wash to them,” says Maru Kopelowicz, a global creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi, which researches consumer attitudes toward Tide as the brand’s lead advertising firm.

Procter & Gamble spends heavily on research and development to continually ­refine the sensory by-products of doing the laundry with its leading detergent. Tide’s original scent was “citruslike,” in the words of Sundar Raman, the marketing director of Procter & Gamble’s North American fabric-care division, but has evolved into a “citrus, floral, and fruity experience” with hints of lemon, orange, roses, lily, and apple. When combined in a complex perfume, these notes help cover up the odors of the cleaning agents that would otherwise waft out during the wash cycle.

However, P&G also chose each scent to do a specific job. The smell of citrus, for instance, has been shown to correlate strongly with perceptions of cleanliness. “That natural, fresh-and-clean smell is stimulating and creates an instantaneous mood of being happy,” says Craig Warren, a former researcher for the firm International Flavors & Fragrances who, until the late nineties, did work with P&G. Floral scents, for their part, have been known to evoke strong feelings of maternal love and kinship. (Home visits by Saatchi researchers have found that very ardent Tide fans sometimes carry bottles as if cradling a baby.) All these efforts aim to turn clothes-washing into more than a to-do; it’s being a good parent and a good person. It’s a message that may also explain why, among some lower-income shoppers, according to a 2012 newsletter by branding agency Daymon Worldwide, “being able to afford Tide laundry detergent is seen as a sign of success.”