Why do people pay money for toilet paper and throw out junk mail?

I just had that thought as I dumped a load of flyers into the recycling today. In the olden days, when kids behaved themselves and farming was a viable livelihood, the most common place to find the Eaton's catalog was in the outhosuse. Now this leaves me to wonder, which came first, toilet paper sold to consumers or glossy paper used in catalogs, and did one precipitate the adoption of the other? Surely it was a paper company behind both market pushes, perhaps they smartly realized they could cut down on the re-use of their product and get an extra sale out of it.

Now, like everyone I've known the discomfort of realizing you didn't check if there was any toilet paper left before laying some cable, and having to look for a substitute, and I know that we as a society simply can't go back to the days of scratchy crumpled up catalog pages.

But why not wed the world's of bullshit and human shit once again, for the benefit of advertizers and consumers?

Why not produce rolls and rolls of toilet paper with advertizements printed on them, and give it away for free? People get the free toilet paper, like they used to, and advertizers get yet another opportunity to showcase their product to a captive, and let's face it, often bored, audience.

The trick is to find a sufficiently mild ink to use so that the black-fingers newspaper readers experience won't be a problem for our more sensitive bits. Perhaps garish full-colour ads could be replaced, at least in the beginning, by outlines and simple text. This would make the concept more palatable to the average consumer as well. And then there's the decorative option, of creating an advertizement in the quilting pattern of the paper itself, much like with that fancy-schmancy paper towel they sell on the teevee.

The possibilities are mind blowing. Even charging advertizers a fraction of one cent per square would land windfall profits to someone taking on this idea.

The potential profits are simply phenomenal.