If you wanted to buy a Confederate flag last week, you would’ve had options.
Even in the immediate aftermath of the murder of nine black churchgoers at Emanuel A.M.E. in Charleston, you could buy it all over: at Walmart or Sears or K-Mart. You could get your hands on one without even leaving the comfort of your Confederacy-loving home, by ordering your flag, or flag-adorned apparel, on eBay or Amazon.
But no more. Less than a day after Gov. Nikki Haley declared the Confederate flag had no business flying above the South Carolina State House, Walmart, the biggest retailer in the United States, announced that Confederate flags would no longer be for sale at its stores or on its website. Sears, too, is pulling the Stars and Bars from the shelves of Sears and K-Mart stores (the former owns the latter).
By Tuesday midday, eBay hopped on the bandwagon. In an email to CNN, eBay spokesperson Johnna Hoff said, “We have decided to prohibit Confederate flags, and many items containing this image, because we believe it has become a contemporary symbol of divisiveness and racism.”
Amazon was absent from this movement for most of the day on Tuesday. If for some reason you still were in the market for a new Confederate flag before about 2:45 p.m. today, you could’ve headed on over to Amazon and treated yourself to one of the hundreds of Confederate flags and other regalia for sale.
Amazon has just confirmed the Confederate flag merchandise will be removed from the site.
But as of early Tuesday afternoon — minutes before that news broke — the Confederate flag, in a variety of sizes, held the top five spots in the “Movers & Shakers in Patio, Lawn & Garden” section of the site, a page devoted to items that experience the biggest sales growth over the past 24 hours. At the number one spot: a three-by-five rebel flag that’s seen a 3,620 percent jump in sales. (At the number six spot is an innocuous grill that is going to be getting a lot of attention today.)
Amazon overlord Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, a paper whose editorial board committed its anti-Confederate-flag stance to print on Monday.