Crowds heading to Donald Trump's inauguration cleaned out the world's largest online retailer of its supply of clear plastic backpacks, earlier this week, ahead of the window for two-day shipping.
Backpacks are prohibited at the inaugural, but they're allowed at the Women's March the day after, if they're see-through. Apparently, 70 million square feet of warehouse and fulfillment center was not enough to satisfy the resulting demand. Target got cleaned out, too.
If you're making last-minute plans to head to the inauguration or the Women's March on Saturday, you'd better try something else--like make a clear backpack out of plastic packaging. Amazon re-stocked one of its clear plastic backpack models, mid-week, but at this point, delivery in time for the march on Saturday is doubtful.
The great clear plastic backpack shortage of 2017 tells another story of our fears and our divided country.
It's not the first time a surge in demand has cleaned Amazon out of stock, of course. Amazon ran out of the Nintendo Switch on its release just a few days ago. It also sold out of Rep. John Lewis' books after his very public spat with Trump over the MLK Day weekend. Last month, Carrie Fisher's book and the Amazon Echo were both out of stock.
The great clear plastic backpack shortage of 2017 tells another story of our fears and our divided country. The accessory has gone from 1990s irony through post-Columbine high school fears, to the Trump inaugural, which has a security climate all its own.
Crowds at this inaugural won't likely set the record Trump has predicted--but protesters almost certainly will. Up to half a million are expected at the Women's March on Washington, alone.
Trump's inaugural is also the first since the Boston Marathon bombers used backpacks to hide their homemade bombs in 2013. The lone-wolf attack in Berlin, last December, was a reminder of how much damage an individual can do with very little organization.
So, backpacks won't be allowed through security checkpoints at the Women's March (here are the rules), unless they are of the clear plastic kind. I know this because my wife is in Washington as I write this, meeting friends bound for the Women's March together.
If you spend plenty of your time thinking about drone delivery and self-driving cars, "out of stock" seems like a strangely antiquated idea. On the other hand, it may be a simple matter of good, old-fashioned warehouse space. Amazon is among the largest, but its supply chain infrastructure is dwarfed by a less innovative competitor, Walmart, according to a Bloomberg report last year.
Walmart, I discovered today, has plenty of the clear plastic backpacks in stock. Now, those of you who remember how Jeff Bezos joked about sending Trump to space--don't leap to any conclusions. The Walmart-fortune billionaires in the Walton family supported Hillary Clinton, too.
