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Untitled Document
9.19.2001
Flag fever: Supply lags behind demand
• "During the Gulf war we sold quite a few flags but nothing like this," says Tina Croce, co-owner of a Newport flag store.
BY TOM MOONEY
Journal Staff Writer
A run on The Colors has turned many Rhode Islanders blue.
From Tiverton to Warwick to East Providence, hundreds of people have stood in line outside flag shops and department stores in recent days, waiting for the chance to drop some money and raise Old Glory over their front steps.
And they were the lucky ones.
"We ran out of flags on the same day of the explosion," said Arthur St. John, a manager at the Wal-Mart on Post Road in Warwick. "I don't think you will find many flags in the state of Rhode Island at the present time."
Tina Croce, co-owner of Ebenezer Flagg Co., in Newport, said, "We had shipments Thursday and Friday and names [of customers] already attached to them -- and they're gone. We have more shipments coming in, but 600 to 700 names are on a waiting list."
"It has never been this busy, never to this extreme," Croce said on Monday. "During the Gulf war we sold quite a few flags but nothing like this."
Charlotte Giannini runs a small flag store, Majestic Flags & Banners, out of her home in Tiverton.
On Monday, while her telephone rang constantly and her coffee cooled without her having a chance for a sip, she looked out her window to the growing line of customers waiting in their cars.
"I've got people parked outside my house waiting for the UPS truck to come!" she said. "It's awful. Business is absolutely crazy."
Normally Giannini sells one or two American flags a day.
Since last Tuesday's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, it has been "hundreds."
"Whatever I can get, they go," Giannini said. "I could probably fill this house with flags and I would sell them all today. I've never seen a call for flags like this."
Lori Crowshaw, manager of Atlantic Flag and Banner, closed the East Providence store last Friday afternoon because the store ran out of American flags.
When another order arrived from her New Jersey manufacturer over the weekend, Crowshaw posted a sign on the store door, telling patrons that they would reopen at noon Monday, after store workers had a chance to prepare the inventory.
At 8 a.m., the parking lot outside Atlantic Flag and Banner was already full.
And by 11 a.m., "the line was already down the street and around the corner."
Crowshaw said her manufacturer, Annin & Co. of Roseland, N.J., was working 22-hour days trying to keep up with the demand. So far it hasn't caught up.
"They're trying their best, but who [would] have ever thought it would be this fanatical. It's crazy. Never, even during the Gulf war, was it ever like this."
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