The People Behind the Joe Biden Sticker That Has Colonized America's Gas Pumps [View all]

[Demovictory9]

The stickers first started showing up on gas pumps across the country last year: pictures of President Biden, usually placed to look like he is pointing to the price of the gas, with the words “I did that!” beside him. After first spiking in popularity online months ago, the stickers are hot once again these days, thanks to recent sharp rises in gas prices—$4.33 on average for a gallon of regular. With some consumers mad enough to become sticker vigilantes and Biden’s approval ratings in the dumps, there’s only one real winner in this situation: the sticker profiteers themselves.

“It’s been ramping up for a few months,” said Javier Estrada Ovalles, who’s been doing brisk business in “I did that!” stickers at his online store catering to car enthusiasts as well as his brick-and-mortar store in El Monte, California. “But in this last month alone, once the prices of the gas really started going up, I started getting bulk sales twice or three times more than it was before.” He said he went from getting 20 to 30 individual orders a day to 80 a day, and those 80 are often for packs of 10 or more.

The stickers are also moving fast at the Patriotic Products, an online shop run by an Oklahoma-based young man named Keenan. (Keenan declined to give his last name or specific age, saying that he’s “under 21.” He was suspiciously unavailable between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.) Over the past week, “I’ve noticed an increase of organic sales, meaning I’m not having to do advertising,” Keenan told me. He estimated that he’s sold about 1,500 stickers in that time, which is pretty good, but small potatoes compared to August—that was the first month he started selling “I did that!” stickers, still very early in the trend cycle, when he claimed he raked in $40,000 in sticker sales alone. The field was clear then, but now he has dozens, maybe even hundreds, of vendors to compete with.

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As the stickers have become popular, gas station employees have complained about the difficulty of getting them off the gas pumps or the worry that they might rankle some patrons. Estrada Ovalles protested that he doesn’t make the stickers for people to stick on gas pumps, but acknowledged that “they end up there anyway.” Because of that, his stickers are made of vinyl, he said: “If you try to remove ’em, they will fully come off. Wherever they might end up, it’s not a pain in the butt to clean up.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/03/joe-biden-i-did-that-gas-pump-stickers-prices.html