The article quotes "a senior vice president" at one of the US's two largest paperclip makers as saying "We actually can't understand how the U.S. consumption can be so huge". I do hope he's lying or misinformed by his colleagues, because otherwise what we have is a company with a tens-of-millions-of-dollars business that doesn't understand what its customers do with its products and apparently hasn't taken the elementary steps that might enable it to find the answer. (E.g., find 100 people, pay them a bit of money and ask them "What have you done with paperclips in the last week?" and "How many paperclips did you buy last week"; repeat a few times.)

It doesn't seem impossible that he might be lying. For instance, suppose it turns out that most paperclips are never used -- they get bought in large quantities and lost, or they're only easily available in quantities much larger than most people need, or something. Then a paperclip vendor might well not want to let customers know, lest they buy less.