This is going to be one of those posts thats going to get linked to quite a bit in future posts. Why? Well, because I get tired of repeating over and over again a brief encapsulation of why I buy as many of a particular thing.
Uncertain Goods
I’ve mentioned this in the past, but Uncertain Goods are items whose future availability cannot be readily assured. It’s not a black and white issue….some items will be more uncertain than others. And, depending on the nature of the apocalypse you are forecasting, all items can be Uncertain Goods. Lemme give some examples…
Dental Floss. Those little plastic boxes with the spool of floss and the cutter? Yeah, those. Are they an Uncertain Good? No..I am virtually confident that tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year I will be able to walk into a Walgreens and buy as much of it as I want.
The more forward thinking of you might say “But, in a nuclear war (or similar event) the availability of just about everything would be affected, therefore all goods are Uncertain Goods.” Strictly speaking, this is true. This is where evidence and history come into play. Best I can tell, we haven’t had a nuclear war lately, nor have we had a global failure of the dental floss crop due to floss weevils. Additionally, I’ve heard nothing about dental floss prohibitions, taxes, confiscations, panic buying, distribution chain failures, and that sort of thing. To my way of thinking, dental floss is not an Uncertain Good. Oh, I stock up on it….but not because I worry about it’s availability, but rather because if I can spend fifty bucks and get a few years worth of the stuff tucked away, that’s one less thing to deal with.
Contrast the dental floss with, say, plutonium. Plutonium is an exceptionally Uncertain Good. I can walk out of my house and get dental floss from a half dozen different places without even needing to drive. Plutonium , on the other hand, is something you really have to make an appointment for. Even in ‘normal’ times your ability to obtain it is challenging. Throw some political or social turmoil in the mix and it gets even harder.
These are, obviously, two extreme examples but I think they make the point. An Uncertain Good is one whose future availability cannot be guessed at. Here are some items that, in my opinion, are Uncertain Goods: prescription meds, hard-to-find car parts, clothing in special-order sizes, odd batteries, certain chemicals or mixtures of chemicals, etc. Basically, if the only way you can obtain something is to special order it off Amazon or pay for it with a credit card, it’s an Uncertain Good. (Note that I said ‘the only way’…the fact that you buy your TP off Amazon to save money doesn’t mean it’s an uncertain good. You could buy TP at your local grocery. If you live in Nowhere, WY and you need a forward mounting bracket for the fusebox in your ’89 Saab you’re pretty much only going to get that through Amazon or some other internet contortion…thus, it’s an Uncertain Good.)
Take me, for example. I wear shoes that are, nominally, EEEEE width. (Yes, I have wide feet. I can walk on snow like a moose.) My only source for shoes is a couple specialty outfits on the internet. Thus, for me, shoes that fit are an Uncertain Good. So, I keep several pair on hand.
Alright, we’ve established what an Uncertain Good is. Your idea of what it is and mine may differ due to our regional differences, but, broadly, we should be on the same page. Now it’s a matter of scale.
Relative Uncertainty
Take my 5E shoes and the plutonium, for example. Both are Uncertain Goods, we’ve established that. Now, which of the two is more likely to be difficult to obtain at a later date? Probably the plutonium, right? So in a priority-based system of acquisition, I’d probably want to score the plutonium before I score another pair of black walking shoes. Both goods are uncertain, but one is likely (IMHO) to be more uncertain than the other.
Quantity
Ok, so we know what Uncertain Goods are, and we know that some Uncertain Goods are more uncertain than others. So why do I need several hundred G3 magazines? Or a dozen ARs?
Both of those items are Uncertain Goods with a history of threatened availability, and a near constant threat of diminished future availability. Or, put into simple terms, they banned ’em before and they want to ban them again.
Okay..so they’re an Uncertain Good, with a definite likelihood of future availability being a problem, but why do you need so many???
I have another 25 years on my meter. We’ve established these Uncertain Goods may become unavailable at any moment. So…if tomorrow I couldn’t call up Cheaper Than Dirt and order more, and what I had in the closet had to last me the rest of my life, would I feel comfortable with that? Well…a lot of stuff can happen in 25 years, so I’d want plenty to cover things like loss, breakage, confiscation, abandonment, theft, trade, gifting, and ‘just in case’. When you look at it in those terms, five magazines for your Beretta 92 when your’re forty years old is not a ‘lifetime supply’. In fact, it’s laughably short-sighted.
The Matt Foley suvivalists (You know, the ones who think all you need to survive the apocalypse is a Mosin Nagant and a vaaaaaaan down by the riverrrrrrr.) are aghast at the notion of spending money, but if your career goals go beyond being a WalMart greeter and complaining about ‘the rich’ full-time, you can afford such things. The secret to being able to afford things like guns designed after World War 2, food that isn’t stored in 2-liter pop bottles, and housing that doesn’t have a license plate holder, is to complain less about people who have more money than you and start doing what it takes to become someone who has more money than you.
The paradigm I use is: if I could not get any more of these [items] tomorrow, would I be comfortable with the amount I currently have. I’ts not any more complicated than that.. When I buy supplies and items to enhance my survivability, I’m thinking on the long term. Even a ‘personal’ EOTWAWKI like a job loss or health issue would benefit from such planning… its one less thing to worry about.
Obviously, there will be a couple factors to consider – cost, storage, expiration, opportunity cost, etc. I wouldn’t buy a lifetime supply of Toyota Tacomas because of cost, I wouldn’t buy a lifetime supply of drinking water because of storage issues, and I wouldn’t buy a lifetime supply of bananas because of expiration. But, something like, say, toothpaste? Dental floss? MagLites? Blankets? Lantern wicks? I’d have no problem with several dozen in storage.
So there you have it. Next time you want to comment and say “You have one Blastomatic 500, why do you need fifteen magazines for it” you’ll have your answer. And maybe the rubric of “if I could not get any more of these [items] tomorrow, would I be comfortable with the amount I currently have” might prove useful to you. But, regardless, those are the reasons and logic behind why I buy as much as I do of some items.
All I can say is “AMEN!”
Kind of an inventory management isssue; if you don’t know what you have on hand, you won’t know how much of it you have, and no way to project how much of it you might need.
Well, yeah….there’s a requirement that you kinda keep track of what you have or don’t have. But, that’s not a good reason to not do it.
I didn’t say it wasn’t; knowing what you have (and where it is) allows projecting the quantities you need, which is the foundation for procuring what’s necessary. How many of us “buy another one” because we can’t find the two we have? Or, maybe, even knowing that we already have two.
It’s not hard envision circumstances in which one has 2,000 rolls of toilet paper but only one can opener because inventory ignorance led to procuring materiel that’s “top of mind.”
Proud Matt Foley survivalist here ( although I own my own land to park that van on ). I think we can all agree that the economic collapse is ongoing. And we can all agree that you don’t store a can of seeds and expect to be a farmer immediately. You need practice. And, you need practice being poor. The way the economy is going, most of us are going to be poor very soon. If you max out earnings to max out prepping, you can’t just suddenly stop spending money on a moments notice. Matt Foley preps allow you to learn to live on less money, as well as prep for a lot less. Which is also a skill. Which takes time to perfect. I’m not saying it is perfect, or for everyone, just that you should not so readily discount its utility.
I use a somewhat flexible algorithm/flow chart sort of thing to think to think about this kind of stuff.
The first part of the algorithm is how necessary/useful is an item for me. Since Plutioum and television are both of no use to me and probably toxic to human life my thinking about them stops right there. Wether they’re available or not isn’t important as I have no use for either of them.
Dental floss, being handy stuff, makes it further along to how available is this item? Being widely available I don’t have to worry about one or two suppliers going down and me not being able to get a resupply from somewhere. Some people don’t realize that most processed foods come out of just a handful of factories. If you’re dead set on having Swiss Miss brand instant cocoa you’d either better lay in a big supply or hope the one factory in Menomonie, Wisconsin that makes the stuff stays online. If you don’t care what kind of cocoa you drink, you’re golden.
Next up is what form would a outage take: temporary, partial, or absolute. If I run out of dental floss and have the stomach flu, so I can’t get to the store for a few days, or trucks can’t get to the stores for a few days because of a big winter storm, that’s a temporary outage. A partial outage happens when either I have to search around to find something or a product is available, but it’s not my preferred type/brand. An absolute outage is where something goes away completely and is never coming back period.
My preps, or whatever, are geared towards the partial or temporary outage of necessary things. My thinking is that if something goes away forever, it’s best to have enough of whatever you have to help you ease into another way of living/doing things without that item. I know myself well enough that I know if a had a huge stockpile of something I wouldn’t start to think about how to live without it until it’s too late and supplies of material goods will alway be finite.
One last thought. Gasoline hitting $6.00 a gallon would be a partial outage as it’s available, but I wouldn’t be buying it in normal quantities. After the run up in gas prices in 2007 I moved so that I’m close to work and shopping and started doing some of my getting around by bicycle. At this point 99% of my car use is recreational. If gas prices shoot up again, I can get on with life without my car just fine.
A similar question to ask oneself is: Is it enough if I can’t get out to get any more tomorrow? It doesn’t matter how much is in the store if I can’t get to the store.
I don’t know how many others here are old and/or decrepit, but I’ve found this to be a question I’ve asked myself more than once. There have been times we haven’t been able to leave our home because of weather or health issues. After an injury last fall I (& my animals) would have been up a creek had it not been for my husband. We’ve changed the way we do some things so they will be easier to do in the future. We’re still working on other possibilities. The only possibility I don’t want to face is moving into town.
It’s very similar to what we use to guage what to spend our money on. Sometimes it’s space. Sometimes it’s past experience (the Clinton magazine ban got me once!). So, yes, I suppose you could look at some of my purchases as excessive, but when things go on for 2-3 months and you run out of TP, don’t come crying to me after you were critical of my purchasing vs. your new 65″ 4K Ultra TV with 8 gaming systems attached!
I’m with you on this Cdr Zero. Something I have believed since making the move out of the city and into the country is that two is one and one is none. If you can have more than two, have more than two. I figure In the worst case scenario, if you have extras and don’t need them you can always use the extra items as barter.
You left out one other important “pro” factor on that side of the balance scales:
If I have 500 lantern mantles, but find myself unfortunately short on fishhooks, a breeding pair of chickens, or packets of seeds, or whatever, and a fellow who has one or more of those things in surplus to his own needs comes along, he and I can deal with each other as humans have for going on 10,000 years and more, do some trading, and both walking away better off than we were before.
Afterwards, he can make more fishhooks after the sun goes down, or keep his chickens laying eggs more hours each night, so he has more of his stuff to sell, and I can catch fish or breed my own chickens, because I had more mantles than I could ever use.
If I did nothing but once a week, put $20/wk of some small, durable, and useful things, like needles and pins, fishhooks, lantern mantles, kitchen matches, etc., into a .50cal can, in 5 weeks I’d have a small stash potentially worth a crapton to others, at minimal expense, which might provide me with barter goods come the day. And if I find $40 worth of mantles in the Clearance aisle at Wallyworld for $5 because summer is over, and they need to turn over the goods and the space at cost, I made out doubly. Doing that on progressively larger economies of scale is exactly how Sam Walton made WalMart, btw, without even having a Zombpocalypse and running Bartertown to help things along.
Let’s recall that the Dutch purchased Manhattan Island for a paltry $26 in trade
trinkets, and to this day, the Indians who sold it to them are still pretty sure they came out ahead on the deal.
Trading is what we do as a species, and it’s why only capitalism works, among all the financial systems tried.
I thought Montana was where all the dental floss was grown. Or was Frank Zappa misleading us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=220xlHky1SY