Amy Schumer doesn’t know anything about a reported Tampax shortage — even though some of the blame is being shoveled onto her.
“Whoa I don’t even have a uterus,” the comic said Thursday on Instagram, reacting to a screengrab of a story in which Procter & Gamble put some responsibility for the shortage of tampons on her. Schumer had her uterus and appendix removed last September as she struggled with endometriosis.
Seems Schumer’s 2020 Tampax commercial campaign was too big a hit for the company to handle?
Since the 2020 campaign, “retail sales growth has exploded,” P&G spokesperson Cheri McMaster recently told Time. P&G didn’t respond immediately to The Times’ request for additional comment, but apparently its factory in Maine has been running 24/7 to keep up with a 7.7% increase in demand.
How an increase in demand of less than 8% over two years has resulted in empty store shelves in mid-2022 is unclear — so, yeah, skipping the whole ongoing supply-chain crisis, it could be the ads. In theory.
“It’s come to my attention that I have a vagina that I know very little about,” the “Life & Beth” star said in a July 2020 #TimeToTampax ad, speaking into a hand-held Tampax-branded microphone inside a mall.
“So I’m here with Tampax to talk to people and find out what we really know about periods and vaginas. Because when we don’t talk about them, we don’t learn about them.”
Schumer then went out into the mall for woman-on-the-street — and a-bunch-of-dudes-on-the-street — interviews about things such as how to put in a tampon and which of the various tampon sizes might be appropriate for different people. Comedy (sort of) ensued.
Of course, that doesn’t really explain reports of other feminine-hygiene brands being out of stock as well. According to Time, there’s been a tampon shortage across multiple brands for about six months.
———
