American rental car companies sold off about a million cars when demand stopped for a few months and now they can’t buy more in time because of the semiconductor shortage and shipping issues.
As a consequence there are, for example, literally no rental cars available in Montana until September. This will further fuck with the economy of a geographically-large, public-transportation-less state hugely dependent on tourism June through August. Not many tourists gonna be driving between Yellowstone and Glacier and, naturally, there’s no train.
In AMERICA, the most car-dependent place in the fucking world, the country where a wad of bills is most supposed to get you whatever you want, you cannot temporarily acquire a car. And we’re so hypernormalized etc that nobody’s really noticed.
It’s a damn Slow Collapse Baklava, layer upon layer of flaky contradictions stuck together with the gooey impending common ruin of the contending classes. We’re all individual cells burning off our ATP reserves as we wander the dark cooling hallway vessels of the great corpse
wow i thought this was only happening in Hawaii. people are renting u-haul trucks there to get around, lol. and locals are buying up every used car to rent out on Turo.
PS: i like the shining-matt conclusion. :matt-jokerfied:
fuck that’s why the price was insane when I looked into it last week
good to see capitalism slowly hanging itself at least
Queue up Driversy, the new sharting economy platform that lets Montanans rent their private cars to tourists for a mere 40% platform fee! We empower you to gamble with your livelihood for 15 dollars a day
I know this is a bit but there actually is a “rent out your car short term for a few bucks” company
I know! they used to be called Relayrides then they changed their name to something else. But the pay was shit and if someone messed up your car the company was pretty hostile towards its users, like many such platforms.
hilarious. I work for a big institution that has historically maintained its own vehicle fleet since cars were invented, but just before covid the austerity bean counters have been gutting every in-house service provider and signing contracts with huge corporations. and naturally, they slit the throat of fleet services and told us we all will be getting cars through a single rental company and how big of a savings this would be (the savings are never for employees raises unless you’re at the C-level, naturally)
in the covid era we’re all virtual anyway, but I am so looking forward to the massive gangfuck that results if this trend is widespread, because it will fuck shit up royally.
