I am pugnaciously parsimonious but I have more than met my match. On fast road trips, I stay at the famed Motel 5 chain where they not only don’t leave the light on, they may not even supply the bulb. This trip, I stayed at the Motel 4.5.

Toilet paper squares used to be, well, the shape they were named for. The Motel 4.5 found squares with the perforation at about the 60 percent mark. Each piece was the standard four and one-half inches wide but it was just two and three-quarters inches long.

That thousand sheet roll didn’t cost any less, though.