Shoppers Panic!
December 31, 2010, Submitted by: Ken Tweet
dramatization
Having just returned from running a few errands during New Years Eve Day, I felt it would be informative to post an observation that I believe to be telling about what could happen during a real crisis situation.
We ran out to the grocery store to pick up a few things (in retrospect, it would’ve been better to wait until after the Holiday), things we didn’t really need to get today – but we did anyway. Let me tell you, I was astounded by the “bad” behavior of most drivers on the road and shoppers inside the stores, most of them with a genuine look of of panic about their face.
This was the same “look” and behavior that I grew up accustomed to while living in New England years ago, seeing it the day before – or the day of a snowstorm. People would flock to the grocery stores in sheer panic, and clean out the bread and milk shelves first, and then move on to anything else they could get their hands on. All the while practically pushing and shoving, rushing to get to the shelves first, and with complete disregard for others around them. Desperation.
What surprised me today was the fact that we are not in New England, there is no snowstorm tomorrow, Okay there’s a rainstorm brewing in the Pacific – big deal. It’s simply the day of New Years Eve. People were desperately grabbing supplies for their parties tonight, or Holiday dinner tomorrow. It was as if they didn’t have anything in their cupboards at home at all, or cannot deal with the store being closed for just one day.
I don’t know how many people dashed their shopping carriage into mine, and how many of them would dart in front of us – cutting us off in order to grab that tub of butter first, after all, their were only about 100 of them left…
“Unbelievable”, I said to Lauren. Imagine these people in a “real” crisis? It would be like a disaster movie where people are slugging it out to get the last case of toilet paper and people stealing the carriages of others madly running out of the grocery store filled with the last bits of product left inside the place…
Truly, many of these people had “the look” in their eyes on the edge of panic.
We really are just 9 meals away from chaos in this country!
I’ll bet that many of you that read this will know exactly what I’m talking about. Amazing, isn’t it?!
‘Just-in-Time’ technologies have really put the food supply and distribution system at risk…
Happy New Year!
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“We really are just 9 meals away from chaos in this country!” Could you elaborate?
Yes i do know what you mean! its New years day here, went to the shops yesterday for a few small things, you would think by the huge flock of people grabbing anything they could lay their hands on that there was no more deliverys for a month! and the worse part is, shops are open today!its a good reminder for us to have a peek at such panic, its a very clear picture of the huge chaos and total change of character as the ‘humane survival instinct’ kicks in, and with anyone of the many’situtions’ that are on the point of taking place it really would be ‘dog eat dog’ so,how prepared are we? to avoid being caught up in the terrible panic and confusion, we need to ready and fully prepared as now much as we can now!! For me, i’m glad that i am part of the ‘prepper’s family’ Take care everyone. Pat
Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Day 1 without food, people are a bit hungry… Day 2, starting to suffer… Day 3, Starving and desperate.
Day 4 – total chaos as they atart to fight to the death over the last tin of beans…
Two years ago, I wrote a little book on crisis preparedness in my native language (Dutch), because there was no east readable book at that time.
In that book I wrote something along the line: After three days without food people will steal for food, after a week they will kill for food.
I am convinced that the civilised manner we go about every day, will be out of the window at the first sign of real trouble.
They cannot believe that supermarkets can run out of food. Just because it has never hapened (in their lifetime). And it is this what will cause the panic.
Family and friend laughed a bit when I talked about it three years ago. But in the last few months many of them bought silver or gold and started to buy extra food.
Not much maybe, but just thinking about it will reduce the panic to manageble proportions.
In the mean time, we, my wife and I, have build up food reserves for about 10 people for a year. So we can help those in our direct neighbourhood.
We also sold our suburban house and bought a smaller house with more land, in a lesser populated part of our country.
The village we live in now has 300 people and just one school with 35 children. In the last year we worked ourselves into the community. I help out with the childrensclub, and my wife is busy helping out with schoolactivities.
Because people have been snowed in several times in the last decades, people here probably will panic less than in the bigger cities. And there is a lot of food being produced in the fields aroud the village. Mainly potatoes.
For any Dutch people visiting this blog: the book is called: “Crisis Survival, een voorbereiding op rampen, of hoe leg ik een voorraadje aan”.
Given that peoples attention spans are now measured in seconds, I’m supprised they could get this together.