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
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.