The Daily Mail has reported that (for some strange reason) that a study has been carried out on socks and other small items that go missing from the laundry. The article goes on to state that this isn’t just a domestic nuisance it can cost a £240 a year per household.
Researchers haven’t resolved the mystery of where they go, but they have established that a family of four will lose up to sixty socks every year.
The result is that 82 per cent of young men say they’ll end up wearing odd socks at least once a week.
Missing socks are most likely to affect the male members of the household, a national survey of 1,500 Brits by laundry specialists Dr. Beckmann found.
Northern men are top of the list as the most likely victims of sock disappearances, with 67 per cent reporting that they lose up to 15 socks a year. Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds are the next most likely places for socks to go missing.
Black socks are the most likely candidates to go missing, with 78 per cent of those surveyed complaining that these are the most difficult sock colour to pair up after a washing cycle.
Young men aged 14 to 25 are at a higher risk of suffering from missing socks and 82 per cent of this age group admit to wearing odd socks on a weekly basis as a result.
Conversely, females in the same age bracket are most likely to be able to keep track of their sock pairs as only 21 per cent said that they regularly lost a sock in the wash each week.
Laura Unsworth, from Dr. Beckmann, said: ‘The majority of people in the UK have fallen victim to lost socks whilst doing their laundry. This phenomenon has long been an affliction of regular washers – these research findings will surely resonate with everybody who has pulled a single sock out of the washer drum.
‘Where the socks go is one of life’s great mysteries, clearly this is causing some distress and a great deal of inconvenience to Britain’s washing population.’
The strange part is that, although washing machine repairers do pull out more than a few socks and other small garments from washing machines, the machines can’t “eat them” and there’s nowhere that can go except down into the filter where they can be recovered. So the mystery remains on where these items actually go or, where they are even really being lost.
Of course we could always do what most manufacturer’s recommend for small items and use laundry nets for small items and then we shouldn’t lose anything.