A bidet spray a day keeps the grocery store away.
Thanks to that logic — and the spread of the novel coronavirus in America — the bidet industry is now booming, at least stateside.
As American shoppers have started hoarding toilet paper, making the bathroom product harder to find at grocery stores, others are turning to the bidet as a possible solution. Numerous bidet manufacturers are now reporting dramatically increased sales in the United States.
“Tushy’s sales over the past few weeks have grown from double to triple to more like 10 times what they were in weeks before word spread about TP shortages,” Jason Ojalvo, CEO of the bidet startup Tushy, told Wired. “This could be the tipping point that finally gets Americans to adopt the bidet.”
While bidets are a hygiene staple in other countries, they’ve never quite caught on in the U.S. — for many Americans, bidets have simply remained the butt of numerous jokes. The Wired article references a 2018 piece from The Atlantic, which posited a theory for why Americans have treated the bidet with skepticism: Americans were introduced to bidets during World War II, when troops were stationed in Europe. “GIs visiting bordellos would often see bidets in the bathrooms, so they began to associate these basins with sex work.”
A recent article by Business Insider mentions Brondell, a home product manufacturer that has seen sales spike for its bidet products. Brondell’s spokesperson, Daniel Lalley, told Business Insider the company is selling a bidet on Amazon every two minutes — totaling approximately 1,000 units per day.
“The company earned $100,000 in one day this week through Amazon sales,” the piece says, “an ‘exponential’ increase over an average day, according to Lalley.”
Bidet sales have been so successful, in fact, that bidet manufacturers are now facing a logjam of orders. For Tushy, bidet pre-orders are now available on its website, but shipping isn’t expected until late April, the Los Angeles Times reports.
How much does a bidet cost? That depends. Portable travel bidets sell for as low as $14.99. Other clip-on bidets, which attach to a toilet’s existing water supply line, go for between $79 and $109 on Ebay, according to the Los Angeles Times. Stores like Lowes, Home Depot and Wayfair also sell entry-level bidet seats for as low as $250.
For bidet distributors, the bottom line has never been better.