put your superego at ease in hotels

I’m in my final UK hotel on this trip out of about 5. Every last one of them featured one of those guilt-inducing signs about towels in the bathroom. You know the ones I mean: “Think of how much the environment is destroyed every time we need to wash a towel. But the choice is still yours: we will give you a new towel if you want one.”

Normally I am easily sucked into guilt about environmental degradation, but hotel towels are the one exception. The reason is that I know someone who worked high up in the hotel industry who told me that this stratagem is a running joke in the industry, that they all smirk, chuckle and congratulate themselves about how they’ve hoodwinked the public with environmental guilt into saving laundry costs for the hotel, and so forth.

So, please turn off your superego whenever you see those signs in hotels. Don’t get me wrong– I think it’s actually good to reduce laundry by reusing the towels. But please don’t do so with any trace of obedience to the laughable pseudo-moral judgment of these money-grubbing hotel chains.

And once in awhile, if the hotel is particularly annoying, I just throw the towel on the floor every day.