I added up a year of toilet paper, laundry, and 5 other household staples on Amazon vs the supermarket — here's the real number

Toilet paper is the product every household buys without thinking about it — which is exactly why it's the one most people never bother price-checking. Same goes for laundry detergent, hand wash, bin liners. They're small enough per purchase that nobody sits down and works out what a year of them actually costs.

So I did. Seven staples, each one the Amazon Subscribe & Save bulk pack compared against the identical (or functionally identical) supermarket product, same brand where possible, real per-unit maths on each. No lifestyle change, no giving anything up — just buying the same stuff through a cheaper channel.

The honest number for a standard two-adult household: about $320 a year, across all seven categories.

Bigger households — kids especially — will see a noticeably bigger number. Laundry and toilet paper both scale hard with household size; the figures below use the same 2-adult baseline the site's savings calculator uses everywhere else, so it's comparable across articles rather than the best-case number.

Toilet paper

Laundry detergent

Ibuprofen

Hand wash

Body wash

Bin liners

Dish soap

What to actually do

1. Start with laundry and body wash. They're the two biggest dollar savings here and both are simple pack-size swaps within a brand you either already use (body wash) or are willing to try (laundry).
2. Add dish soap, hand wash and bin liners — smaller dollar amounts, but genuinely zero-effort since it's the identical Morning Fresh, Glad and Palmolive lines you're already buying.
3. Set ibuprofen and toilet paper on Subscribe & Save last — the savings are real but modest, and ibuprofen (and dish soap) are worth double-checking the live price on before you subscribe.

The one-click version

All seven verified categories are pulled together in the site's Household Saver bundle — same maths as above, but as a single page with an "add everything to Amazon" flow instead of seven separate searches.

The bottom line

Across all seven verified categories, the combined annual saving for a standard 2-adult household switching each to its Amazon Subscribe & Save bulk pack:

• Laundry detergent: ~$135/year (brand swap, biggest single line)
• Body wash: ~$51/year
• Dish soap: ~$45/year (price-volatile — check before buying)
• Hand wash: ~$36/year
• Ibuprofen: ~$34/year (price-volatile — check before buying)
• Bin liners: ~$12/year
• Toilet paper: ~$7/year

Combined: roughly $320/year, before you count anything else on Subscribe & Save. Households with kids will land meaningfully higher — laundry and toilet paper both scale with household size faster than the other five categories. For the full household picture, see the Subscribe & Save guide, and for the toilet paper deep-dive specifically, the Quilton pack-size maths.