Hot Potato

“There’s no upside for any retail brand associated with sales of the Confederate flag,” said Allen Adamson, managing director at brand research firm Landor Associates. “This is a potato that’s too hot to handle.”

While smaller retailers may be able to charge more for the paraphernalia, the Confederate flag is like Kryptonite for big retailers, who face far more downside from carrying the items than upside from revenue, Adamson said.

The overwhelming majority of flag sales in the U.S. are for the standard national version. Of about $303 million worth of American flags shipped by U.S. manufacturers in 2013, more than 90 percent of those sales were for the “Stars and Stripes,” said Reggie Vandenbosch, president of the Flag Manufacturers Association of America. The estimates are rough because all of the companies are privately held, he said.

The trade group, which makes the quality flags that fly on government buildings, estimates that only $4 million of flags are imported from abroad, mostly from China. The Confederate flag ranks far behind the American, Texas and military flags that are most popular, Vandenbosch said.

Proud Rebel

“From a business standpoint it’s really a rounding error,” he said of Confederate flag demand. “It’s so small for us, we don’t really talk about it.”

But for Ron Hammon, demand for the vestige of the South’s history is strong enough that he makes a living hawking Confederate flags, T-shirts and trinkets on his Proud Rebel online store. Hammon defended the Confederate battle flag as representing Southern culture and not racism.

“A lot of it is just regional pride,” he said.

The flag, featuring a blue X filled with 13 stars on a red background, at the center of the controversy now was originally upheld as a sign of Southern pride and heritage and an homage to Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War. In the following years, especially during the Civil Rights era, the banner became a divisive emblem of white supremacist groups.

In one photograph of Roof, he’s holding the Confederate flag in one hand and a pistol in the other. Another image shows him burning the American flag.

Sales Boost

As with guns, any whiff of controversy may be good for business. After a political tussle in South Carolina that resulted in a compromise in 2000 to remove the rebel flag from the capitol building and allow a version to fly at a less-prominent place on the Statehouse grounds, sales spiked, Hammon said. That may happen again as Haley seeks the two-thirds majority in the state legislature necessary to rid the state grounds of the flag.

“Ironically, it will make these items incredibly hot,” Adamson said. “For those folks who want it, they’ll pay more for it. For the manufacturers, it’s probably a bonanza.”

Civil rights advocates hope the controversy will end the debate once and for all.

“It’s kind of an incredible thing to think that it’s been 150 years since the end of the Civil War and this racist imagery is that much part of the culture,” said Heidi Beirich, who tracks hate groups for the civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center. “You couldn’t image the same thing happening in Germany with the swastika.”

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