Costco selling $6,000 doomsday-prepper food kits – feed a family of 4 for a year
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
https://ldsblogs.com/9618/mormon-faq-why-do-mormons-store-fo...
Maybe, I mean it's a very cost-effective “i need to eat but not think about it” alternative to something like Soylent (assuming you have the storage space), so there may be a non-prepper market, but...
> Members of the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) are taught to build up reserves of food and other resources.
Pointing to a group for whom being preppers is a religious practice (and maybe even a doctrinal obligation) is not support for the idea that the market for a product isn't just preppers.
Prepper food isn't really practical unless you've got 100 people to feed and can genuinely use industrial food in industrial quantities.
Regardless of the motivations, if this gets more people prepared for an emergency, I think it's a good thing.
Of course you'll have the same problem with these kits in 24 years, having a year of eating nearly expired lentils and dried cranberries if the world doesn't come to an end.
And of course this kit seems to forget about the 1 year worth of fresh water storage. Hopefully whomever buys it doesn't.
If you use and replace 1/25 of your annual consumption with them each year—about a day's consumption every other month—this is less of a problem (with 3-5 year shelf life, the gradual replacement strategy doesn't work as well.)
Such a startup could also offer to take in that 25 year old 1/25th part to give it to a food bank, making the purchase deductible as a gift to charity.
Unfortunately, customers only need to start replacing stuff after years (you may want to replace 1/25th a year on average, but do you really want to start doing that a year after buying this?)
There are similar long-shelf-life food products on the market that aren't kits of the same size; it's true that Costco doesn't sell exact 1/25 increments of the kits (but they do sell a 30-day supply, 30-year-shelf-life kit from the same maker as one of the one-year kits, which lets you do the same rate of replacement with a purchase every two years.)
Gradual replacement is eminently practical.
If the wasteland has hazards or hostile people, I need to worry about my physical security so guns with lots of ammos will go a long way too.
So I keep in my car a lighter, an old dumb cell phone that has microUSB lead I can charge easily with my car cigarette lighter or anything that has USB out, a knife, a super bright flashlight, and a first aid kit. I don't store cans of food. That sounds pretty stupid.
What do you think about storing some water in the car? On the one side, it's the most critical resource after wound treatment and shelter - you won't survive more than a few days without it. Also, if you're just semi-hibernating in a closed environment (and possibly cough recycling), you'll need much less water than normal so you can realistically keep enough water for a week or more. On the other side, most "stuck in a car" scenarios (at least in the northern hemisphere) involve rain or snow, and if they aren't and they last a month or more, your water reserve won't save you.