Helena, MT — In a ploy designed to safeguard the serene beauty and affordable living of Montana, locals launched a bold campaign featuring “No Vacancy” bumper stickers. The plan was simple: scare off the hordes of out-of-staters by providing them notice via bumper stickers. Once a visitor saw notice that there was in fact No Vacancy in Montana because of the sticker on a 2004 Chevy half ton, the tourist would return home without any urge to move to Montana. However, the plan has backfired spectacularly, with home prices and the cost-of-living skyrocketing.
Residents originally hoped that the sight of a “No Vacancy” sticker would trigger some primal instinct in would-be newcomers, compelling them to head back to the urban jungles they came from. But instead, the stickers seem to have had the opposite effect. “I saw a couple here last month looking at the house next door with a realtor, and now they are moving in. They clearly saw my No Vacancy bumper sticker and yet they still bought the house. To make it even worse, they have put a No Vacancy sticker on their Tesla,” described Jim Artosin, long time Montana resident. “It’s like they don’t understand what No Vacancy means, maybe they are foreigners or something weird like that.”
“It’s like these people see ‘No Vacancy’ and think it means ‘exclusive club,'” grumbled lifelong Montanan Amy Thompson, whose property taxes have tripled since 2020. “They see the sticker and suddenly want in on the secret. It’s like we’ve turned Montana into a hip speakeasy.”
Indeed, the campaign seems to have inadvertently marketed Montana as the must-have address for the well-heeled and perpetually Instagramming crowd. The allure of wide-open spaces, coupled with the thrill of joining a supposedly full club, has proven irresistible.
“I’m from California,” said Emily Sanders, while posing in front of her newly purchased $1.2 million “rustic” log cabin. “When I saw the ‘No Vacancy’ stickers, I just knew I had to move here. It’s like a challenge, you know? Plus, who wouldn’t want to live somewhere so exclusive? Also, bumper stickers are totally cheaper in Montana than in California, so it really worked out well for us. I put them on all our cars and my husband put them on his vintage acoustic guitar and IPA fridge. We had a bunch of them on our custom Finnish Sauna, but the moisture kept making them fall off.”
Montana’s original residents and state officials are not amused. The influx of new residents has strained infrastructure, driven up housing costs, and led to shortages of everything from craft beer to locally sourced elk jerky. State officials have tried to get answers about the faulty stickers from original No Vacancy sticker designer Sarah Johnson, who took a state contract for $500,000 to design and produce the stickers. “We have reached out dozens of times to Ms. Johnson, and she insists that the sticker should be working as designed,” said a state marketing official. “If these stickers are defective, we need to try to get our money back, but she has gone silent and we fear she has absconded to Idaho – where thousands of No Vacancy Idaho bumper stickers have popped up in the last month.”
As Montanans grapple with their newfound popularity, they are forced to attempt a new form of discouragement. State officials have pitched several new ideas, but many of them are reluctantly dismissed due to their overt racist nature. “Montana, White as Our Famous Snow…” was on the table until it was leaked to the press and the state was forced to scrap it under pressure from advocacy groups. “Yeah, that one was pretty good, but after we thought it through a little, we aren’t having a problem with minorities coming, it’s mostly just rich white assholes,” admitted a state official who declined to be named for this story. “We’ll figure it out. I think it’s going to have be something that really hits home for these people, like telling them there are no Trader Joes here.”
With a failed sticker campaign and state officials striking out on new ideas, the future is uncertain for Montana residents who had their hopes set on a bumper sticker-based deterrence system. For now, as home prices skyrocket and farmers markets fill up with Californian transplants naively paying Hutterites $5 per tomato, it would appear that the immigration onslaught will continue.
