A friend of mine just traveled to Hawaii only to find that, along with all of the expected pains in the ass presented by COVID, he had no rental car waiting for him after reserving it two months earlier.

Meanwhile, it is nearly impossible to rent a car at one airport if you’re hoping to drop it off and fly out of a different airport.

It’s a fairly well-known and universal travel problem right now that car rental companies have no inventory. Why do they have no inventory? Because when COVID hit, they thought the best idea out there for reducing expenses was to sell off their inventory.

As things finally return to normal and travel picks up, nearly every one of these companies is running into the same problem: They have no cars to rent, and there’s certainly no flexibility for people with special reservation needs.

Who the hell thought it was a good idea to sell off the company’s core assets? The entire business is predicated on having cars to rent. You can’t really provide the car rental service if you have no cars. That’s the first word in the business description. “Car” rental.

COVID sure led to a lot of bad decisions, power grabs, infringement on personal freedoms, and sheep-like exploitation. As a country, we learned quite a bit about the state of America, or more specifically, Americans.

Let the rental car industry stand as yet one more indicator of just how ridiculously we behaved during this horrific pandemic that killed not quite 99.99% of Americans.