The anxiety capital of the interior design industry? Memphis, Tennessee. There, alongside Elvis’s estate and Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken, you can find the FedEx World Hub, a 940-acre logistics engine attached to the Memphis International Airport. There, 13,000 employees have the capacity—in normal times—to process 484,000 packages an hour . At the moment, the World Hub is also home to an unknown but extremely frustrating number of fabric samples, doorknobs and vases, all stuck in limbo. These are not normal times.

Recently an interior designer told me that Memphis has almost become a meme in her firm—a shorthand for a mysterious problem with no clear solution. Painter didn’t show up for the job? He must be in Memphis.

To be fair, it’s not just FedEx, and it’s not just Memphis. T

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