The liquid soap dispensers in the lavatories at work are the bog-standard variety, the type found in their millions in workplace and public toilets all over the world.

Most times I use them, the little splodge of soap shoots straight past, round, or, sometimes, seemingly right through my outstretched palms, and ends up on the basin, or on the floor. Hardly ever does it land on the first attempt where it is supposed to: in my hands.

Is it just me?

Is it just me? Or is there a design problem here?

Let’s be generous. Let’s say 50% of the soap dispensed by these off-kilter soap squirters ends up where it is meant to go: into the hands of the soapee. The other 50% is wasted, either going straight down the basin, or, worse, onto the floor, where somebody has to clean it up.

Missed!

So for every £100 of soap we buy, £50 is wasted.

Bug, or feature?

From the point of view of soap manufacturers and distributors, this is good news. They sell twice as much soap per soapee as they would do if their soap hit the target every time.

From the point of view of the people whose job it is to refill the soap dispensers, it depends, I suppose, on whether their contract pays them per unit of soap they install, or just a flat rate to keep the premises in soap.

From the point of view of the soapee, it’s slightly annoying, but only very slightly. Usually on the second or third attempt I manage to get my hands in the right position and operate the dispenser with just the right amount of force to get the soap to land where I want it to. The soap that lands on the floor is (I’m ashamed to say) someone else’s problem – a negative externality, in economic terms. I’m not paying for the wasted soap, and I’m not the one who has to clean it up.

But somebody is paying for the wasted soap (and the clean-up). Most probably, it is the landlord of the premises. Or, maybe, it’s the company whose job it is to keep the soap dispensers filled (if they’re paid a flat rate). But even if they are paid a flat rate, they have probably factored the soap-wastage factor into the flat-rate they charge to the landlord. So really, the landlord pays.

But then, the landlord has probably already factored the cost of the wasted soap into the rent his tenants pay.

So actually, Adhere pays for the wasted soap.

But then, Adhere has probably already factored the cost of the wasted soap (and all the other overheads which we have to cover) into the rate we charge our clients.

So are our clients paying for the wasted soap?

That doesn’t sound so good. Fortunately, they’re probably not. Because we work in a competitive market, we try to keep our prices as low as possible. We can’t just arbitrarily increase what we charge our clients to cover the cost of all that wasted soap. If we tried to, it would be an invitation to our clients to go and do business with a competitor with lower costs and a better soap-management system in place.

So who the heck is going to pay for that wasted soap then?

Here’s the bad news: it’s probably me. If the company can’t pass on the cost of the wasted soap to its clients, it will have to cover the cost by finding efficiencies elsewhere. Like by paying me less, for example.

Oh dear. Now I’m really cross.

What am I going to do? Well, I could go and work for a different company with higher salaries and a better soap-management system. But that’s a big decision to make over a bit of wasted soap. And it’s a bit unfair on Adhere, since they’re not actually responsible for the soap management system in Fazeley Studios anyway.

I could, I suppose, resolve to be more careful with the soap dispensers, and try to reduce my personal soap wastage rate from its current high level (I reckon it’s over 75% at the moment). There might be training available for this. There might even be a government grant or tax-break to help cover the costs of the training.

But that’s not going to help very much. There are a couple of hundred people working at Fazeley Studios. Even if I improve my personal soap wastage rate, it’s hardly going to make a dent in the overall soap wastage rate measured across all two-hundred-plus soapees.

The other possibility is that, somewhere out there, someone has invented a better soap dispenser. A soap dispenser which does what it’s supposed to: shoots its soap right into the palm of your hands, on time, on target, first time, every time. It can’t be that hard, can it?

Maybe I could persuade our landlord to get these installed instead.

But why would the landlord want to do that? We’ve already established who’s paying for the soap. It’s not him, it’s me. So is he going to want to spend hundreds of pounds on new, laser-guided, computer-controlled, nanometre-accuracy soap dispensers when, as far as he’s concerned, the shortcomings of the existing dispensers are not really his problem?

I suspect not.

Oh well, it looks like there are no easy answers here. Maybe the best solution would be for the landlord to remove the soap dispensers altogether (on the understanding that there would be a commensurate reduction in rent, of course), and for everyone to bring in their own soap and to be responsible for their own soap management.

I can’t see that being a popular proposal, though.

So maybe we’re stuck with the system we’ve got, inefficiencies and all.

I just feel sorry for the guy who’s invented the high-accuracy soap dispenser which could save hundreds of poundsworth of soap over its lifetime, but which no-one will buy because they don’t think they’re paying for wasted soap.