I’m not quite sure what you mean here. Storing anything, even if you’re diligent about rotating it, costs money.
Um, not always. We aren’t into ‘storing’ up a lot of food, but we do have a reasonably full pantry as a way of saving money. For example, a week or two ago the local grocery had Progresso soups (which we like) on sale for 88 cents a can – way, way cheaper than ‘normal’ sale price, let alone the ‘regular’ price.
So I bought 40 cans. Not because I fear being snowed in for a long stretch, but it simply means the next 40 times we want a can of soup it will cost us 88 cents rather than 1.50 (common sale price) or $2 plus (usual price.)
We save quite a bit over time by doing this.
How? Does my house payment magically go up the more things I keep? Will it magically go down If get rid of some of the things I already have?
I could easily store several months worth of non perishable food in my house with no extra cost other than the cost of the food.
Well, in my parents’ case, they store large amounts of water and wheat. Both of those require special containers. They also have to purchase a home with a large storage room.
I suppose they could save money in the long run if they consistently ground and used their own wheat and ate MREs before they expired, but who wants to live like that?
Why can’t you sell or barter? Maybe someone has a generator, and you can draw up a contract that if power goes out, they will share their generator power with you. Or trade for candles, oil lamps, or flashlights. Or you can sell for cash, because we’re talking about a blizzard, not the total breakdown of civilization. Or you can trade some of your canned food for fresh food that will go bad-- maybe someone has apples, and some food in a deep freezer, or something like yogurt in the fridge, that keeps for a couple of weeks, but not forever. Or maybe someone will swap DVDs, so you have something new to watch while you’re snowed in. Or someone with a 36" TV they will swap for your 32" if you throw in some canned goods. There are lots of possibilities.
Before the TV show, that was not what “hoarding” meant in common parlance. I don’t know how long it has meant something to mental health professionals but
Thank you Frank.
Exactly.
It’s hoarding. Before there was a shortage, it was just saving, or storing. Heck, the Amish can food and put away stuff in root cellars for the winter-- so did everyone before we could count on food being available in stores year-round-- and it’s not hoarding. Before the TV show appropriated the word, “hoarding” pretty much implied a precious resource was involved. I suppose the fact that the people on TV have some sort of delusion that worthless stuff is precious makes what they are doing “hoarding,” the same way some Holocaust survivors stockpiled food, soap, and other things they were deprived of either in hiding, or in a concentration camp, was a kind of hoarding, because they couldn’t shake the feeling that those things were a precious resource, even while living in post-war US.
Heck, there’s a strategy in the game Monopoly called “house hoarding,” where you put houses on your properties, and don’t upgrade to hotels, so no one else can improve their properties. It’s the only way to win if you have cash, but other people have more or better properties than yours. In fact, it’s one of the reasons the game has a finite number of houses-- they are supposed to be a precious resource.
Why does your assumption about why they aren’t stocked up rely on them “not being arsed”? Like I said, it could simply be because they didn’t see this disaster coming. You’re portraying it, effectively, as effort vs. non-effort - the grasshopper and the ant. But all that needs to be lacking is the thought that effort needs to go into X, Y and Z. Come disaster, that understanding would most certainly be there.
And like I said, preparation doesn’t equal ability or mindset to carry it out. I have no doubt there are people out there content in the knowledge that the ravening hordes would fall one-by-one to carefully placed headshots from their magnificent bunkers, only to find that shooting half-starved men, women and children isn’t much to their liking. Or that their bunker didn’t account for things like “fresh water”. Or that their carefully honed intentions to kill anyone who tried to take what’s their from them aren’t the best when it comes to keeping the peace inside.
And hey, at the end of the day, twice as many seems like rather an optimistic outlook. There must be, I’d guess… 200 or so people living down my road alone? For 2-to-1 odds, I’d need 75 people all prepared, on the same plan, and all hunkered up together. For just my road. Perhaps you live in the middle of nowhere, which of course would help. But eh, we’re getting rather a long way from the whole “ethics” question.
Some people don’t keep backstocks of food because they don’t have a lot of money, as well. Of course, your neighbors are probably on a similar socio-economic level as yours, so if you can stock, they can stock, but things happen. If your neighbor just came through an expensive illness, or has a child with a disability or is a single parent with several children, and either a widow, or has an ex who tries his or her best to dodge responsibility (or maybe doesn’t work for some reason), income may be high enough, but their expenses may be a lot higher than yours. Maybe they keep intending to backstock food, but it just doesn’t happen.
BTW: if a poll had been posted, yes, I’d share. I’d probably do some bartering, but I’d be generous. If I really had enough for my family for a year, and the news says the disaster will last two weeks, I’d probably multiply that by 2.5, and put a generous portion aside just for my family to last 2.5 times the estimated length of the disaster, then I’d take 1/2 of the rest of the food, and share. I’d just give food to people with small children who really had no food. I’d trade with people who had stuff they needed to get rid of, and might not be able to consume themselves. If people had meat they thought was on the edge, I’d probably take it for my dog, in case I didn’t stockpile a lot of dog food. I’d cook the meat, of course. If I had no treats, like candy or cookies for my son, I’d probably be willing to trade for a little of that, and I’d sell for cash, but not at a profit. I’d trade for other things I might need that I hadn’t thought to stockpile, like toilet paper, Band-Aids, and shampoo. Some people are coupon shoppers, or Sam’s club shoppers, who happen to have a lot of some odd thing on hand, because they had a “buy 2 get 1 free” coupon, or they bought a Sam’s club 5-pack.
Why do you imagine that the guys coming around to confiscate your stuff will be a disorganized mob of ex-welfare bums? It’s a lot more likely to be armed sheriff’s deputies.
During a disaster or breakdown the people who survive won’t be tough as nails bastards who defend their bunker with a shotgun. It will be people who are organized into a community. A bastard with a shotgun has to sleep sometime, a bastard with a shotgun can still trip and fall and break his leg, a bastard with a shotgun can still come down with influenza or any one of a thousand illnesses.
Human beings are successful because we work together. Look at actual examples of societal breakdowns, and you’ll find, not a Mad Max style free-for-all, but rather of people sticking with and relying on their local communities. If you think surviving means being willing to shoot your neighbors in the face if they show up on your doorstep asking for help you’ve got the exact wrong survival philosophy. Yes, sometimes your neighbors show up with machetes, that happened in Rwanda. But a lot more people survived because they were helped by their neighbors than because they massacred the neighbors. Even if you shoot the first wave of genocidal bastards, they know where you live, and you’re going to have to bug out, leaving behind your precious hoard of canned goods. A man has to be prepared to abandon his luggage to save his life. Lots of people throughout various disasters died because they couldn’t bring themselves to leave behind the various treasures they had accumulated.
So, “organized into a community” means forced redistribution of personal property at gunpoint? That is how you began, yet somehow you want me to accept that as “working together” and “relying on community.” You have some strange and twisted notions, and people with some very similar notions did awful things in living memory.
I’d share my provisions in exchange for whatever my neighbor can provide with me. As a single person all alone, I’m likely not going to have everything I need or the ability to do everything that needs to be done. I will need friends, and food will be my currency to procure them.
If my neighbor has nothing to offer me whatsoever, I don’t know what I’d do. I want to say I’d still share. But I just don’t know.
There was something similar to this in the novel Dies the Fire, where the local government attempted to forcibly confiscate food and medicine from some of the groups to redistribute it to the needy, even though what that meant was that everyone would starve (in their defense, they didn’t realize this and just thought of those who wanted to keep their own food and medicine as hoarders and bad people).
It seems to me that a lot of people in this thread are crossing over from a discussion of ethics to one more akin to the tactics of survival (or, at least their opinions on the optimal tactics of survival in a very difficult situation).
The thing is, how do you predict the future and know that the disaster is only going to last another 30 days…or 60 days? I mean, to be honest, any disaster in the US that has you having to rely on yourself for even 30 days is going to be pretty epic.
How do you decide who you share your food with? How would you go about sharing it? The thing is, there are a lot more than 22 people who live within a block of me. Do you share with those you can form a community with and basically fuck the others? Do you share with anyone and everyone? How do you decide? And, as with the above, how do you KNOW that the disaster is only going to go on for that 30 or 60 more days? What if it doesn’t? How will you feel if, having shared your food out the disaster is a bit worse than you thought and it goes 180 days…sadly, your food that would have lasted a year is all given out now, so your family starves too since it took that extra 30 days for the government to get it’s shit together.
There you go. What do you do? Because if you share a little randomly, you will end up sharing it all. I think that, ethically you take care of those you are responsible for first, and if you evaluate the situation as one that you think there WILL actually be help in some timely manner you share what’s left over. Perhaps you help the community, and you share with those who are equally willing to help. It’s going to be a judgement call in the end, and you are basically betting your life and the lives of your family and perhaps friends on the call you make.
It’s not hoarding…it’s stockpiling, as you implied at the end of this paragraph. Hoarding is something else than preparing for a disaster. Like you said in the first part of your OP, some people prepare for local weather issues by having enough food on hand for a week (I used to regularly do this when I lived on the east coast). Some people prepare a bit more than that. And because of their religion or other things, some prepare for more epic disasters.
I think Lemur is talking more about a community like I described in my post above. In my neighborhood, if there’s an ice storm that causes a multi-day power outage, we won’t be scrambling to assemble a community, and we won’t be worried about going it alone. We know who has portable generators, we know who has ATVs and 4x4 plow trucks, and we have plans for how to use them.
We don’t really plan for the zombie apocalypse, or TEOTWAWKI, as those aren’t realistic scenarios but, if necessary, we know how to cut off our road, and enough of us are ex-military and hunters that we could keep it closed.
Excellent point. When the Big One hits, me and my friends will go barricade ourselves into a Costco. In the meantime, I have better uses for my basement.
Except for the fact that everyone else has this idea, and most security is predicated on having a relatively quick law enforcement response. If someone wants into an unfortified building and can have as much time and noise as they want, they’re going to get in.
PS: the real deal is in the distribution centers anyway.