Thirty-two-year-old Kira Pickens is the proud owner of a brand new, $12,000 camper. She and her husband Ryan tow it behind their Toyota Tacoma when they want to get out of Austin, Texas.
“It’s just a little pop-up. So, instead of like the canvas pop-ups that get wider, it just kind of pops up to like an A-frame,” Pickens said.
She said they’d been talking about getting an RV for a while and decided to make it a Christmas present to each other last year.
“We got it in January,” she said. “And then, it’s like, come March and April, it became a boom where everybody was getting one. So I’m kind of actually really glad we got it before that.”
RV prices have been rising during the pandemic.
Monika Geraci with the RV Industry Association said sellers first noticed something going on in the spring, which is already normally a good time for RV sales.
“But it became clear very quickly that this was not pent up demand,” Geraci said. “These were new people who had either maybe considered RV-ing, but this was what pushed them over the edge, or a lot of people who had never considered RV-ing now were looking for a way to get out and travel.”
It kind of makes sense. Over the summer, lots of folks didn’t go on vacation and stay in hotels. Instead, a lot of people bought RVs.
Geraci said suppliers are seeing a big increase in first-time buyers who are overwhelmingly buying cheaper, towable RVs. Shipments of those units are up more than 35% from a year ago.
In fact, the industry is having a hard time keeping up with demand.
Colin Duffy sells RVs at Camper Clinic just south of Austin, and said he can’t order enough units from manufacturers. That’s partly because RV makers were forced to shut down for a while in the early days of the pandemic.
“So what happened was the factories shut down for 45 days for all of these different brands,” Duffy said. “And the dealerships sold off of what their existing lots had.”
And while new buyers are snapping up the RVs they can find at dealerships, not all of these RV converts are in it for the long haul. Industry observers are expecting a strong used RV market to develop on the other side of the pandemic.
Are states ready to roll out COVID-19 vaccines?
Claire Hannan, executive director of the nonprofit Association of Immunization Managers, which represents state health officials, said states have been making good progress in their preparations. And we could have several vaccines pretty soon. But states still need more funding, she said. Hannan doesn’t think a lack of additional funding would hold up distribution initially, but it could cause problems down the road. “It’s really worrisome that Congress may not pass funding or that there’s information circulating saying that states don’t need additional funding,” she said.
How is the service industry dealing with the return of coronavirus restrictions?
Without another round of something like the Paycheck Protection Program, which kept a lot of businesses afloat during the pandemic’s early stages, the outlook is bleak for places like restaurants. Some in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, only got one week of indoor dining back before cases rose and restrictions went back into effect. Restaurant owners are revamping their business models in an effort to survive while waiting to see if they’ll be able to get more aid.
How are hospitals handling the nationwide surge in COVID-19 cases?
As the pandemic surges and more medical professionals themselves are coming down with COVID, nearly 1 in 5 hospitals in the country report having a critical shortage of staff, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services. One of the knock-on effects of staff shortages is that people who have other medical needs are being asked to wait.
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