While many individual preppers and prepper organizations try to remain anonymous, the number of people preparing appears to be growing. In the last year alone, roughly 45 percent of Americans, or about 116 million people, said they spent money preparing for hard times or spent money stockpiling survival goods.
Allan Stein
August 6, 2021
‘Preppers’ Quietly Stock Up for the ‘Perfect Storm’
[We live in interesting times.—Joe]
The question should be truned around: Who would not prepy? I’m out on the eastern plains of Colorado dealing with my brother’s estate and people out here are very conservative and don’t like what is going on. They prep and they own guns.
My guess is that it is the well off llberals are the ones not preping but that the very rich, the deplorables in flyover country, and urban conservatives are.
The other thing to remember is that what we call “prepping” today in my parents time was called “living”.
My wife has a fit if she can’t just run to the store 2 or 3 times per week for something we are out of. There were times when I was growing up in the back woods where we did a major shop once per month. And if mom didn’t buy it, we went without. That was 2 or 3 carts of food stuff at the commissary which was a four hour drive from where we were stationed.
It is also interesting in how “prepping” has gotten a bad name. And in some cases it is actually illegal. I remember an article out of Michigan. School assignment, take pictures of you food shelf. Kid took pictures of the pantry without telling mom.
Teacher saw pictures heard that this wasn’t the only pantry, told the police that the parents were “hording” and they were arrested and charged under some sort of anti-hording law.
My mom is as liberal as they come. Watches MSNBC 10 hours a day. She does not drive anymore so I have to drive her everywhere. I have to take her everywhere. Last month a took a week and a half of PTO. I took her grocery shopping literally 9 of those 11 days. To multiple grocery stores every day and sometimes the same ones.
I’ve been buying silver for years. Bought crypto and extra food as a separate stock. Have been stockpiling ammo for years. Early 2020 I bought over 6,000 rounds of various calibers and body armor before everything went crazy.
Thing is people know what I have and have been doing. Two have already said they are coming to my house if things get crazy. I’ve already told them they are not.
As for being arrested it’s called the 1950 War and National Defense Defense Production Act whom Obama of course expanded upon in 2012.
“Thing is people know what I have and have been doing. ”
This was a major mistake on your part. There can be multiple bad results.
One problem would be some level of .gov showing up at your door to confiscate ALL of it, and telling you to join the lines at the .gov food dispensary to get a meal. While taking the food, they will most likely take all the rest of your supplies.
Another would be someone who knows telling a group about it, for a percentage of the spoils. You and/or your family might not survive this visit.
Various neighbors/coworkers/relatives showing up to ask/beg for some of it is a given. Expect to encounter some with an entitlement attitude toward your stuff. The ones with the attitude will be the ones likely to spread word to bad people to visit you for re-distribution efforts.
Most people can’t keep a secret, especially about this sort of situation. They can’t conceive of the problems that will result from them flapping their lips about your stores. Envy will drive some of it.
Yet another angle is that this “prepping” thing in many ways looks like what any observant Mormon would do.
“…“prepping” today in my parents time was called “living”. “
Absolutely. Summers on Grandma’s farm taught me that; the “big city” (pop. 10,000) was 35 miles away and we went on the first Saturday of each month to get the “store bought” items we couldn’t make or grow.
The average supermarket has 3-4 days of food on hand at normal demand rates. The warehouse that supports that supermarket chain has 5-8 days of food at normal demand rates. There’s usually 1 day riding in the chain’s trucks between the warehouse and stores. Do the math.
Anyone who has ever lived in the mid-Atlantic or northeast knows what happens when the TV weather guessers use that four-letter word (snow); the herd descends on the stores and picks them clean. We saw that again in spring 2020 with toilet paper and baking supplies (Pro Tip: consumer packaged stuff wasn’t there but the commercial lines continued uninterrupted; yes, you may have to haul home a 25 or 50 lb bag of flour or a case of 64 or 96 TP rolls, but it was there. At the moment, Amazon has a case of 8X 1,000 ft 2-ply TP rolls (the 9 inch rolls found in interstate gas stations) for ~$27.50; that stuff was always available when the supermarkets were empty.).
It’s very refreshing to see so many people increasing their supplies at home. It shows people are actually paying attention and thinking. That, and gun sales and increased demand for gun training are quite encouraging.
for what it’s worth, I visited the Cash & Carry to pick up a few things. Never have I seen the shelves so bare. short chat with a employee said that because of people out sick at the warehouse (or shippers, or somewhere along the line) and restrictions on the number of workers allowed in the warehouse at a time due to covid fears, they’d been getting short every shipment for a while, no sign it was going to improve greatly any time soon. to put numbers on it, he said they normally got about 20 pallets a day, they only got 8 that morning, 10 the day before, and some other single-digit number pervious, and no delivery at all one day.
Other stores appear to mostly be OK, just running on the slim side of JIT so no margin for surge demand.
Everyone should always have at least a few weeks worth of staples on hand, preferably a month or more.
Sort of off-topic, but sort of not…..
I was discussing this with my wife last night. The situation in society at large is only going to get worse, far worse, once the resignations, retirements and mass firings kick in. Who delivers the food? Who stocks the shelves? Who runs the distribution centers? Puts out the fires? Operates and maintains refineries? Nuclear power plants? Who repairs the power lines after a storm? Treats the sewage? Picks up the trash? A great many of them are people who aren’t going to take that needle no way, no how. They also make our society run.
My wife and I, along with a great many others, work in organizations that run lean. I looked at my section at work and I understand full well that if one generalist (myself) and one specialist (a woman in the office next to mine) resigns, then production dates will not be made, deadlines not met and the entire office will fall farther and farther behind. And we’re not the only ones in our workplace who will leave; we’re just the ones I’m certain about.
The organization where my wife works is considered “mature”; the average age is 54, and if a mandate comes down a great many of these folks will just retire or quit; an astounding 45% of all the employees at her workplace are eligible to retire tomorrow. And the retirees will carry a great deal of institutional knowledge with them. My wife has discussed this with a manager, and he has heard estimates that nearly 30% of her supervisors and co-workers will vanish overnight. Her institution will simply stop. My institution would continue to function after a fashion, but there would be a great deal of chaos.
Discussions are taking place in homes around the country. My wife and I have concluded our discussion, and we’re going to leave our jobs. I don’t know what will happen after that, as the bills will still need paid, but living under an overpass is preferable to taking that needle. Many, many others are making the same call, and chaos will erupt when we all leave at nearly the same time. I think a great many of the unseen people who put our food on the supermarket shelves will just leave. Then things start getting spicy.
It’s interesting to note that neither Amazon or Walmart is mandating the needle for any of their front-line workers. Both companies have issues with churn anyhow, and their store and distribution centers simply won’t be able to function after losing so many people who were working what were “McJobs” in the first place. I also suspect that what is happening with Spirit Airlines right now is vax mandate related. It was probably no more than a rumor that Spirit was considering a mandate, and the employees began leaving in droves, rumor or not. The authorities in my neck of the woods keep bleating about the lack of available hospital beds and everyone needs to be needled. i suspect the shortage of beds is because of shortage of staff. Seems like I read someplace that it takes four nurses to support one ICU bed, plus a host of other support people. If we had any journalists in this country they’d make some phone calls and uncover the staffing issues. I know what I’m hearing, however, and the situation in hospitals is becoming dire.
I suspect that this winter we’re all going to have need of the supplies we’ve stashed away.
I think we’re about to find out how an unfathomably complex, state-of-the-art, high technlogy economic system with uncountable interlocking functions operates at mid-19th century levels of personnel and technlogy.
Ought to be pretty damn interesting.
Outstanding. Could not have said it better myself; my wife had me read your comment to her three times. What astounds us is the absolute lack of foresight on the part of the leaders of these organizations; a hospital system will mandate the needle but then act surprised when the nurses and other support staff begin to flee.
On the off chance that you think you will be force to get the vax, I think that if you prep yourself properly you can minimize the damage. Load up on D3, C, zinc on a regular basis before, and dose with ivermectin shortly before, and regularly after, you get it. It’s clear they knew that the vax would weaken your immune system and make it MORE likely you’d do badly. https://archive.ph/9Sow9 and they deliberately nuked their control group data collection by vaxing them, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/19/969143015/long-term-studies-of-covid-19-vaccines-hurt-by-placebo-recipients-getting-immuni?t=1628416291657
However, ivermectin may minimize and possibly reverse some of the damage the vax, and the disease, cause. (they are almost the same thing, as the protein spike the max makes your body manufacture is cytotoxic in and of itself). Ivermectin appears to help your body clear the spike-nabbing leukocytes rather than storing them, so you don’t get a “cumulative” effect. https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/
And, of course, for anyone interested, a link to my “plague page” where I have been keeping track of vax/covid related stories on a regular basis. https://www.thestarscameback.com/plague/
Thanks for the tip. I won’t be taking the needle. I only have a few lines that can’t be crossed, but that is one of those few. I’m going to be taking a closer look at your blog/website.
A long way back, I lived for a couple of years in Sweden at the height of their flirtation with “Democratic Socialism”. It is interesting how they have come to their senses. The State run industries have been turned into private companies with amazing results. What really surprised me recently was that the government is actively promoting people to get into a prepping lifestyle. The government has made it clear that should there be a war or natural catastrophe, there will be little if anything the government will be able to do to assist people for some time. The Swedish Army is even using experienced preppers to train personnel and other interested people. Makes it difficult to not attribute the responses made here in the USA against conservative preppers as part of a conspiracy. The wisdom of being prepared is simply unassailable.
“The wisdom of being prepared is simply unassailable.”
Not if you’re a big government statist itching to exercise power. “Prepping” – what used to be called “life” – is simply the exercise of personal responsibility to increase resilience.
Can’t have that when government is supposed to be the parent and establish control over the toddlers; if John and Jane can feed, employ and defend themselves then they won’t need much government. Or much Google. Or much Facebook. Or much Amazon…..
Supply chain disruptions continue. Latest I have noticed is energy products like gas, diesel, and those little green propane canisters. I understand there is a shortage of truck drivers with the special certification to haul the stuff. Random shortages of particular food items continue but don’t persist for long time.