囤積居奇 | Preppers pay big

Have you ever thought what you would do if there was a sudden collapse of civilisation that shut society down, or in the event of a nuclear holocaust that wiped out all cities but somehow left you alive? ​

How about a zombie apocalypse where everyone became undead besides you and a few select friends who were inexplicably left unharmed? Although these events sound implausible and downright ridiculous if you think about them rationally, there are actually many people (mostly in the United States of course) who spend their disposable income or even large chunks of their life savings preparing for these unlikely events; they are known as ‘doomsday preppers’, or just ‘preppers’ for short.

They squirrel away tonnes of food, water, weapons and ammunition in extremely expensive, decommissioned Cold War nuclear missile silos or bunkers that have been specially repurposed and retooled with all the mods and cons of urban living – all sealed hundreds of metres underground. Instead of using their time, energy and money to try to make the world a better place and prevent any of these types of manmade disasters from occurring in the first place, they are much more content preparing for the worst and just looking out for themselves.


Since most of these bunkers are far away from where these paranoiacs actually live, they expect to somehow safely drive (or teleport perhaps?) the hundreds or thousands of kilometres to get to their safe havens once disaster has already struck. Then what are they going to do? Hide out until aliens arrive and save them?

Wait until the radiation/zombie plague/roving bandits have disappeared on their own and then come out and then repopulate the world with other selfish, paranoid fatalists? Ironically, they are probably being exploited by unscrupulous businessmen stoking their fears of world-ending calamity in order to convince them to buy what were once the product of paranoid doomsday planning – nuclear missile silos built in case of the need to effect the total annihilation of Russia/China/[insert any number of enemies of the US here].

Then there are Brexit preppers, who seem to have already lost all faith in the power of the once almighty United Kingdom as it severs ties with its neighbours, ancestors and biggest trade partners. Brexit preppers are taking matters into their own hands in anticipation of a total failure by British politicians to save them, and their efforts of hoarding vast quantities of goods and stores, along with stockpiling by businesses in the UK for almost exactly the same reasons, even gave the British economy a boost in the first quarter of this year. Bring on the apocalypse Nostradamus!

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jan/14/i-dont-trust-the-government-to-look-after-me-or-my-dog-meet-the-brexit-stockpilers
https://www.politico.eu/article/brexit-economy-stockpiling-boost-uk-february/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/us/apocalypse-doomsday-capitalists.html