US public EV charging stations

It turns out that when Chinese consumers decide to buy things they don't need on a single designated day in November, American municipalities are simultaneously installing the infrastructure to charge vehicles that may or may not exist yet, and they are doing this in perfect, eerie synchronisation. One might imagine these two phenomena—a shopping festival on the other side of the world and a slow proliferation of parking lot utility boxes in Ohio—would be about as related as a duck and the price of mozzarella, yet here they are, moving together like dance partners who have never met. The universe, it seems, has a sense of humour about correlation.

What's actually happening is far more interesting than cosmic conspiracy: both phenomena are symptoms of the same underlying fever—rapid economic growth and technology adoption across the 2010s. Singles Day sales grew because China's middle class was expanding and e-commerce infrastructure was maturing; EV charging stations proliferated because electric vehicles were becoming viable and governments were scrambling to catch up, often riding waves of stimulus spending and green policy. Think of it as watching two different instruments play the same hidden conductor: the global economy's boom-and-bust cycle, the seasonal crunch of Q4 retail, even just the simple fact that both phenomena accelerated most steeply between 2015 and 2019, when tech companies and national governments both seemed convinced that 2025 would arrive any moment. By 2021, the US had roughly 41,600 public EV chargers—enough to line them bumper-to-bumper from New York to Los Angeles and back again—while Alibaba's Single Day was moving $84 billion in merchandise.

The real scandal here is not that these numbers move together, but that we keep acting surprised when they do. Both are simply expressions of the same global economic machinery humming along at slightly different frequencies, which is a slightly less interesting story than a cosmic prank, but somehow more unsettling. We see patterns because patterns are genuinely there; we just rarely ask whether the pattern is the thing worth understanding. Sometimes correlation is just two things growing up in the same decade.