All About Diapers (Really. Sorry about that.)

Earlier this year, we found our new favorite store.  OK, that's an exaggeration, but I'm so excited that they opened up shop.  And the proprietors are pretty excited that we're regular customers.

It is . . . (dum, dum, dum) . . . a store that sells nothing but diapers and toilet paper, mostly in BULK!  Yes, this really does top the list of excitement when you've got two kids in diapers.  So the other day, I stocked up again on 10 kilos of diapers (5 kilos for each kid).  Let me tell you, that's a lot of diapers. I've got half of them put away and the other half . . . well, we just don't have room for them!  Currently, they're sitting behind the door in the kids' room, where they'll likely stay until Mario gets tired of seeing them there and finds a creative solution for the storage problem.  I can always count on him for that.

Clara with a mere 3 kilos of diapers

To prove how awesome the Diaper Distributor is, let me spell out the savings.  I counted out the huge bag of diapers, and 5 kilos of size 5 diapers is 138 diapers.  I paid 315 pesos for those diapers.  A conventional bag of diapers contains 38 diapers and costs, on a good day, 115 pesos.

         38 diapers = $115
       138 diapers = $315

When doing some rounding in my head, I figured that that's like getting 3 packages for the price of 2 (a deal that Soriana used to do fairly frequently, but it's been awhile since I've seen that advertised).

And using the calculator for exact figures, one conventionally packaged diaper costs almost exactly 3       pesos.  One diaper bought in bulk costs 2 pesos.  (OK, it's not as dramatic a discount as I was hoping.)  But, over the course of hundreds of diapers, that adds up.

Plus, it's pretty sweet to only have to buy diapers once every couple of months instead of once every two weeks.

It turned out to be a good idea to individually count out the diapers, as they come all smashed up and folded funny.  Mario used to work in a diaper factory and 30% of the diapers made there were unfit to be sold and had to be thrown out.

No kidding.  30% straight to the trash.

There is a debate that rages whether cloth diapers really are better for the environment than disposable.  To my way of thinking, it's a no-brainer that cloth diapers are better.  However, it turns out that in comparison to the total amount of trash that chokes up landfills, disposable diapers are a very small percentage of the total trash generated.  And, disposable diaper champions also claim that the water used in washing diapers at home is wasteful in itself.   

However these arguments fail to consider the industrial costs of producing each diaper.  There is a certain amount of water necessary to produce each disposable diaper (putting it close to on par with washing cloth diapers?).  And then fact that one out of every three diapers has to be thrown out!  Yikes!

Wow, that was quite the tangent that I didn't mean to go down!

Anyway, I'm guessing that my cheaper, smashed up and funnily-folded diapers are the irregular ones that they couldn't sell at full price but are salvageable for selling in bulk.  In our last 5 kilo bag for Joe, there were about 30 that were missing the fastening tabs.  Fortunately, those who run the diaper store want to keep their customers and therefore are happy to exchange those 30 for diapers with tabs.  And, if Joe grows out of his size 3s before we run out of diapers, they're also happy to exchange whatever we would have left over for the next size.  Awesome.  

But do you know what the really, really cool part of the Diaper Distributor is?

It's right next to a bulk candy store.  And they sell dehydrated strawberries.

Such a shame that we buy so many diapers in one shot that we only go there every 3 months or so.

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Where is the Diaper Distributor?

In Saltillo, on the south side of the Periferico, almost directly across the street from Soriana Lourdes.