Sooner or later we’ll find something that COVID and the preventative measures surrounding it didn’t impact, but it doesn’t seem likely anytime soon. On today’s list of things made rare & expensive by COVID? Rental cars.
Like Peter mentioned earlier, theme parks are opening back up. So if you wanted to grab the family and head down to Orlando, or out to Anaheim, you better be prepared to pay a king’s ransom for a rental car. Like “$300/day for the use of a sub-compact” prices. Or, better yet, be prepared to walk or Uber because they don’t have anything.
Why?
When everything shutdown and travel ground to a halt in March of 2020, two things happened. Rental car companies found themselves with way too many cars because no one was renting them. Around that same time, commuters found themselves in need of cars as traveling in packed trains and buses suddenly fell out of favor. Tired of paying for extra storage in stadium parking lots and the additional maintenance required for cars to just sit, the rental car companies connected the dots and sold just over a half-million cars to waiting & willing former commuters.
Well, now it’s 2021. People are traveling again and need to rent cars. Cars that the rental car agencies no longer have. And cars that rental companies can’t buy because automotive factories can’t, or won’t, make them due to previously-discussed-in-old-newsletters reasons like factory shutdowns, microchip shortages, and changing consumer tastes in favor of fancier, more luxurious cars.
Us folks in the suburbs are seemingly OK, for now. I just checked and I can get a rental pickup from Enterprise for this weekend to handle any yardwork/hasty-yet-expensive trips to IKEA for just under $95/day. That’s high, sure… about $20 above what it was two years ago… but they’re available. How long that lasts before cars up here get re-routed to more in-demand locations is anyone’s guess.
Oh, and one last bit of news on the COVID-related shortage front. Guess what paper product they’re predicting will be hard to get again soon because of logistics issues? Go on… guess! Did you guess “toilet paper”? You’re right!