It isn’t a perfect store of value, no. Nothing else even comes close however, so I’m not sure what your point is.
Oh gold is still tremendously valuable even after the collapse of civilization- it’s just that food, ammunition and medicine are even more so. See the comment upthread about severe inflation.
As above. Gold is a reasonable store of value as long as some semblance of civilization remains.
Otherwise, the idea of “carrying one’s value around” is a nebulous one. It assumes there’s sufficient civilization that gold can maintain something resembling a consistent value (otherwise, lead in the form of bullets or food or even a nice source for good wooden sticks have greater value) but not enough civilization that fiat currency is preferable (as we figured out over the last couple centuries).
That’s an awfully thin needle to thread. So, civilization has to collapse just enough but not too much for gold to make sense. Perhaps Goldilocks was aptly named in more ways than one.
Depends on the nature of collapse. If it’s a pandemic, nearly everyone dies and the stuff is still here, it’s the labor that is more valuable. Everyone can just scavenge for what they need, don’t need to work, and there are too few of them to pay them anyway.
Money runs into problems where there is too much OR too little of particular needs.
Those things have more utility than money now if you stop and think about it. It isn’t an “either or” kind of thing. The question as always, or in this hypothetical scenario is where to park surplus wealth once basic needs are met. Maybe gold or silver would be good for this, maybe not. Paper currency issued by a failed government would be useless. That’s why gold was known as the “universal currency”, nobody cared whose visage was on it or what country issued it. A gold Denarius still spends fine. Crazy, I know …
The best place to park surplus wealth will be the same place as now: land. So long as there’s even a semblance of civilization left, real estate will always be the most useful asset.
It’s also not just that a majority would go unfed, it’s also that that majority will start to do desperate things when they get hungry - such as raiding farms, but in a way that destroys more than is taken as food.
Here is a YouTube story set in Japan depicting a mysterious failure of all electrical devices. No problem, after a hike out to the countryside the family takes up village life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oufYN24wCKI
So apparently Japanese are SO well mannered that the surplus population of the islands will just quietly starve to death, and not become cannibals or marauding hordes.
Unlikely, if civilization has truly collapsed. You can’t really USE that chunk of gold for anything around the homestead. You could trade it for food or whatever, but the people who have the resources won’t have any more use for that gold than you do. It requires a somewhat more stable, non-barter-based economy for anything not immediately consumable / usable.
Going back to the original questions: a zillionaire with hired security is not necessarily going to do well. S/he would need to be able to enforce his position as top dog to keep the rest of the gang in line. You’ve got to have a long-standing period of building trust and sense of “it’s all of us against the world, and you’re the boss”.
So if I build myself a bunker (or have it built, since we’re assuming the zillionaire does NOT have all the manual skills needed), it’s got to be remote, and somehow built without attracting attention. Otherwise, a week after the “event”, everyone in the nearest town will remember “hey, that weirdo rich person just built this place, let’s go redistribute the wealth”.
What you want is a place that was built a few decades ago, that has a bomb shelter or something. About 20 years back, I picked up one of those real estate magazines at the grocery store and it listed a house in our county that had a fairly large “rec room” / bunker off the main part of the basement. That would be idea (aside from being in a fairly populated area, of course).
Nobody will remember it, and you can stockpile all the resources you need, in advance. That doesn’t address the issues of growing food etc. but will keep you going in the very short term.
Then, let’s place this existing house/bomb shelter in a more rural area. A stable for your pet horse(s), and a few pet goats / chickens wouldn’t be unusual there. Nobody needs to be all that aware of the fact that the horse(s) you bought are capable of reproducing. Or of course you could have a hobby of horse breeding. Rich folks might well indulge. Nobody would think much (though of course the people in town could still remember the horses).
And a really substantial fence - more heavy duty than it seems. Maybe bring a crew out from the city to do the work on that. Hell, become friends with the crew - they can stay, or return when things look dicey, and become part of the compound’s defense crew. Ditto anyone else doing any kind of construction on the place - those kind of skills will be worth far more after The Event than whatever you did to earn those megabuxx.
Get friendly with whomever you have in to shoe your horses, as well. Blacksmithing skills will be quite valuable.
All in all, you need to have SOME kind of community on your enclave, with a wide variety of skills. That fine documentary series The Walking Dead got that right, if nothing else - people banded together and took care of the group.
In the book World War Z (not the purported movie that shared its name), one vignette involved a bunch of rich people who basically planned to ride it out in a mansion out in the Hamptons, while broadcasting their safe life. It was told by one of the security staff. It did not work out well.
As far as supplies: Stable food will do you for a while. The ability to produce more (seeds, farming equipment, livestock). Trade goods (extra tools, extra raw goods such as metal, building supplies, clothing). Medical supplies (bandages, surgical tools, eyeglasses etc.). Medication (which I list separately because that stuff expires). Solar panels. A generator and fuel (which needs to be stable - regular gasoline goes bad in a year or two; would diesel be better?). And books, books, books. Get 'em all in ebook format and store that in a Faraday cage along with a solar charger, but more importantly, get them in print. I might google “how to raise a crop of wheat” right now, but after The Event, we’re assuming the intertoobz are not working.
Other than a few written languages from the edges of the civilized world, what technology was lost in the Bronze Age Collapse?