[reaperducer]

the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals

Both of which are available at Wal-Mart.

I always knew about the guns, but only recently discovered that Wal-Mart stores (at least in Louisiana) carry huge buckets with weeks worth of dehydrated survival food.

I'm sure it's for hurricanes. Yeah, that's it.

[vetrom]

This is a reductionist view of even the suburban United States IMO. There are plenty of locales in what I'd call 'middle suburbia', which I'd define as less than an hour from whatever their geographical city center is. Even in these areas, multiple day power outages, or other localized or regional disasters have been endemic in the last 25 years; often due to utility or local resource mismanagement.

Take, for example, the 2018 California Camp Fire, the various southern winter flash power outages, or the endemic hurricane season pretty much everywhere exposed to the middle or southern pacific.

"For hurricanes" is a cute way to minimize it, but in much of the country it's rather little that separates you from being left to your own devices, at least for a little while, even when you're just suburban and haven't even looked out to the rural U.S.

There is a real deferred maintenance and resource mismanagement issue in this country. The increasing evidence of "preppers" and items like ration buckets becoming prevalent at bulk store operations like Walmart & Costco are early indications of the increasing prevalence of these issues.

Take a survey of the items that are always available at most Costos or Sam's Clubs across the country and you'll see similar results. They essentially market decentralized infrastructure for those that can afford it (or those who can't afford not to have it).

[bombcar]

Costco sells those, too.

https://www.costco.com/p/-/mountain-house-1-year-emergency-f...

Sometimes they even appear in stores.

Apparently Mormons are required to keep some amount of emergency food on site.

[vetrom]

Say what you will about Mormons, but they take the idea of local stockpiles amazingly seriously. It rises to the point where they subsidize stores selling bulk food product direct to customers, at a scale that otherwise you'd need a Sysco or commercial restaurant license in most places to get access to.

Source: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/life/home-storage-center... (In older literature & analysis it used to be called the LDS Cannery or LDS Dry Cannery, but I guess they recently rebranded it.)

[yobert]

Not required. It's recommended by the church leadership though to have a garden and to have a years supply of food storage if you can. I'm not a Mormon but appreciate it as a good idea.

[rpdillon]

If you're thinking about a period without power after a disaster, you're supposed to have a gallon of clean water per person per day, along with food that can be prepared in that environment. At least according to https://www.ready.gov/kit.

For me, it made a ton of sense to buy a couple of boxes of MREs and some Mountain House meals for this. They last decades, and they double as camping food.