Jani, a 4-foot plush giraffe, arrived on my doorstep in mid-July, her neck bent backwards so that she could fit in the FedEx box, her brown eyes glassy, as if still finding her bearings after a long journey at sea.
What a journey it had been. Viahart, the company that sells Jani on Amazon, had ordered a container’s worth of plush toys including her in August of last year. This was around the time that U.S. consumers, cooped up at home, started spending again after an initial dip in the beginning of the pandemic. And as the demand for toys and TVs and couches rose, the ships and trains and trucks carrying them got overwhelmed and added hefty congestion surcharges. That made it much more expensive to get Jani to my doorstep.