Are you a parent? Because I think find the notion of putting my most precious cargo on a zombie’ back so viscerally disturbing that no amount of persuasion would suffice to move me to do it.
I think we may have discussed this before, but I don’t think you’re right.
Early in the process, people are going to go Katrina on the supplies. When there is a hurricane scare, people swamp supermarkets and empty them out for supplies.
In the beginning of the epidemic, people are going to hoard as much food as they can. The food isn’t going to be collected in Walmart, it’s gonna be in people’s houses. And those people might survive until it’s gone, but after three years, how much of it is gonna be left?
Houses are going to be picked over time and again by different bands of survivors.
If the stores in an area have in total two weeks worth of food for the local population stored in them (which is probably high), and five percent of people survive the initial troubles, that’s still less than a year for them to eat. Couple that with the fact that the food is likely to be hidden away in stashes (which may be sitting in a room full of zombies, uneaten).
Think about the facility where Shane and the fat guy that shot Carl went to. There was a building with hundreds of zombies and closed doors. I imagine that was a group that got together and probably raided the area for food to hold out.
Not to mention that the vast majority of food in a supermarket rots. At three years, you’re approaching the lifespan of a Twinkie.
But you’re assuming that if Survivor A finds and hoards something, it disappears when A dies or goes zombie. It doesn’t. It stays right where A dropped it, until Survivor B comes along to pick it up.
So A-M band together, strip a small town, stash it in a barn, and die off. That whole hoard is waiting for N, O, P and Q-Z to find it. Given that the human population appears to be well below one percent of the starting population, maybe even far below that, there should be absolutely mountains of stuff left - whether it’s still on store shelves, hoarded in a barn or warehouse or compound, or just in a heap next to either a corpse or zombie footprints.
While perishables might be getting in short supply, canned, bottled and packaged goods should be widely available. Guns? You must be kidding. Ammo, almost as much so. Cars might be getting a little hard to start, but any town should look like an Automall.
No. This is deliberate nonsense aforethought by the writers, and it’s easily the worst thing about the show. Utterly arbitrary plot complicating.
I’m not assuming that. I specifically said it would be hoarded.
If the vast majority of food is in a few hoards, finding it is going to be difficult.
Or sitting in some hidden compound, where the team hasn’t found it.
How much would be left? If a town has a population of a thousand people, how many days of canned goods (as opposed to perishables) do you think are in stores in that town? One week? So there are a thousand people weeks of canned goods, right? Well if you’ve got five percent of people surviving, that group of 50 people (from the original thousand people in that town) is gonna eat it in six months. If only 1 % survives, they’ll only have enough for two years.
That utterly ignores stuff sitting in lost stashes. Think about it. You have a bunch of people hoarding stuff, and doing their best to hide. As more and more people die, the hoards get consolidated into smaller and smaller camps. Do you think the team has been in every single house in GA? Food isn’t going to be trivial to find.
They aren’t low on guns. But even so, guns are also going to be hoarded, and thus harder to find than they might be. After Z-day plus two there are no guns left in gunshops or Walmarts.
I agree cars are plentiful. But there will be roads that are impassible, so you need to get cars as they are available on the far side of the road.
The writers aren’t perfect, but I think you’re finding fault where there is none.
look at that lovely house in the graveyard where beth and daryl had a yummy meal. seriously, once the crew got back together i don’t know why they didn’t go back to some of the places to stock up. then head out to noah’s house and dc.
also why didn’t beth just get another sweater when they were in the golf club. she got cleaned up, changed her clothes, then daryl got zombie goo on her. she was standing right by the rack of sweaters! just get a new one! but no, she kept wearing the zombie goo-ed one.
There was probably a deep lesson there. You can change your shirt, but you still end up with goo on you.
But yeah, no excuse for not having clean clothes in reality.
In a previous season, Rick told the group not to eat dog food. Now, he’s eating dogs for food. See? Character progression!
People bickering over lack of humor: I agree for the series in general, but this episode was clearly going for a hopeless mood. Humor would have been inappropriate.
The ZA would be heaven on earth for racoons and opossums.
I’m not an expert on food distribution, but as far as I know if the factories and farms stopping churning out products by the millions each day the supply would fall pretty dang fast. Especially when all the meat and milk goes bad without electricity. There might be a lot of things in a strategic food reserve in some industrial site, somewhere…good luck finding that.
But yeah, they shouldn’t be left wanting for clothes or tools.
I remember way back in an early season I mentioned the series title had a double meaning re: the main characters and someone said I was reaching. Suck it, person I don’t remember.
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Cracked had an article about this very thing.
The obvious reminder than the dog used to be someone’s pet made that scene even harder for me. 
I know the groups actions were perfectly logical & justified, but I felt the same way I did seeing the pile of stuffed animals at Terminus.
Now I’m picturing Congress getting rapidly zombified because some old guy died during session, and it taking days for anyone outside the chamber to notice.
I scrolled down to the comments and was glad to see someone mentioned the Zombie Survival Guide, which came up with the wank that the zombie virus is toxic to all life and repels predators, insects, and even bacteria and fungi. So they don’t rot like corpses.
TWD suffers from fridge logic with the people already being infected, but one can imagine it’s a low level of activity compared to actually turning. They should get infected if they get zombie goo in their system though, that’s just silly that they don’t.
I noticed Maggie, I think, almost stabbed himself holstering her knife. That’d be a sucky way to go.
I’ve wondered about frozen zombies in the past too. The US south is getting hit with freezing temps right now. But, the zombies are magic, and the show isn’t about solving the ZA. It’s about surviving in a ZA that is essentially permanent. What do you do when this is the new reality?
I think that in a situation like this, people have so few actual things to hold on to…something simple like clothing becomes massively sentimental and important.
“That’s MY sweater” “That’s MY jacket” “That’s MY shirt” etc.
There was a lot I liked in your post, but this was priceless.
Most incarnations of zombie lore, including Brooks’ fine explications, involve magic in that zombies become inert almost instantly after being brain-forked. The very spatter from their clothes can infect or kill… until two seconds after they’re piked.
And I think you are allowing them to mix tropes as mismatched as Glinda the Good and Mad Max.
Okay, hoarding hoarding hoarding. Just where do you think all those hoards are going when the hoarders get eaten or turned? Do they evaporate like video-game loot and corpses?
So you have first 80%, then 50%, then 10%, then maybe 1% of the population hoarding stuff… with that descent taking no more than a month. Other than perishable food… where do you propose that all that stuff went? Into hoards so well hidden, by short-term survivors who are gone, that the long-term survivors can’t find one in pretty much every house and public building? There should be a weapon next to every corpse, and the descending tree of survivors should mean that most corpses would be pretty well armed, not still carrying grampa’s old single-shot deer rifle. Or driving a rusting Ford van. Or a Kia. Or wearing rags and carrying their possessions in their arms.
I’m still waiting for the magical gasoline in the Walking Dead world to go bad. As anyone with a lawn mover knows, gas doesn’t keep forever. After 6-12 months it’s no good anymore. The zombie apocalypse was in 2010, yet as long as they find a car with gas in the tank they are still driving…
I think that’s a meaningless comment.
I specifically said not. Is it too much to ask that you address what I’m actually saying?
In a town of a thousand people there are maybe 500 homes and various buildings. Schools, offices, government buildings, and stores. Some homes will be far from the town center. When people are hiding and hoarding, it’s not going to be a trivial task to find the one or two caches in that community. Search 500 buildings, basement to attic. Do it when you could be attacked at any moment either by walkers or humans.
You think that’s trivial? It seems to me that you have a cartoony view of how complex the problem of finding those caches of food are.
When the survivors run out of food, they’ll start scavenging the town. They’ll have more time than the team, who are generally passing through.
Think about it. It’s Z-day plus 30. Your food ran out. Your group start methodically searching your town. Eventually you’ll be in possession of all of the easily found food. Your group dies. Unless they find your group’s house, there is no easily found food in the town.
Those corpses may have been scavenged before the Grimes team happens across them. Guns can be hoarded too. And it’s not like the team doesn’t have weapons.
Since parts of many roads will be parking lots, you have to take the cars that will still start on the far side of the blockage. Certainly clean clothes would be more available than food, but maybe when you stink from lack of bathing, your clothes is a low priority.
Aw, shucks. :o
[off topic]
In World war Z (book, not movie) the author addressed frozen zombies. Z zombies were quite a bit faster in that tale. Lots of people fled northward in the winter and discovered that the Zs slowed considerably or froze as the temperatures dropped.
The unfortunate result though was that harsh winters had little food for survivors and Springtime thawed and reanimated the zombies.
I often hear this repeated here, but I have used 5-year-old gas in my car before to no ill effect.