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Posted by sohkamyung 1 day ago

Danish supermarket chain is setting up "Emergency Stores"(swiss.social)
328 points | 352 commentspage 2
tokai 1 day ago|
Feels a bit like cheeky marketing from Salling Group, when its just a concept years away from being rolled out. I don't see them running stores with sub optimal stock and other complexities, just for the good of their hearts. Or maybe they just looked at the odds and concluded that likelihood of a lockdown-like event is enough to make it a sound investment.
ThinkBeat 1 day ago||
If they mostly cover food and other products specifically aimed at preppers / a time of crisis.

How can these store be profitable when there isn't a crisis? Or will they be closed when there isn't a crisis?

unethical_ban 1 day ago||
Three days seems low, but any resilience is better than no resilience.
eddythompson80 1 day ago||
Well, there is always the question of who’s gonna pay for that resiliency. We see it all the time in software deployment. After each extended outage of a major network or cloud/service provider, there is always a flurry of sudden interest in disaster recovery, multi-zonal deployments, failover solutions, and redundancy up and down the chain of everything. 6 months or a year later, people and organizations get sick of paying for that. They either nerf it, making it just a useless checkbox or just abandon it completely because “if us-east-2 is down, then everything is down. Who cares”. A couple of years pass, then another incident happens, rinse and repeat.
larholm 1 day ago|||
These stores are not supposed to prepare you for three days of resilience in advance.

They are meant to be available as reliable and functioning stores throughout a crisis period. Your go-to destination for purchasing vital goods during the crisis.

fragmede 1 day ago||
It's the local supermarket. How many days in advance am I supposed to have food for? (I have prepper quantities of food and don't know what's normal. three days seems pretty normal to me.)
hadlock 1 day ago|||
A big chunk of society has realistically 2-3 days of groceries in their house, plus maybe a 5-year-old bag of rice or pasta and can of string beans buried way in the back. If you have a 1-6 year old you're probably buying 1-3 gallons of milk per week, and need to get more tomorrow.
bigiain 1 day ago|||
As much as I detest organised religion, the Mormons have a pretty good take on this. They strive to have a six month supply of food/water/cash on hand at all times.
throwaway31131 1 day ago||
I get it. But on the other hand, if you in a situation that requires a six month food supply, because there is no resupply available and you can’t relocate, you have bigger problems. Like the mob of hungry people outside your house.
toast0 1 day ago|||
If you have a six month food supply, and survivable disasters really only need a week or two tops, you will have no reservations helping out your neighbors, which helps you be a positive influence on your community in time of need.

If you've only got two days supply, you may not be so generous.

freedomben 1 day ago|||
Exactly. There are surely some people that will be stingy (as Mormons are humans after all) but there's a huge emphasis on being able to help out the neighbors and the unprepared in a bad situation. Depending on the area too, they even have rough distribution/response plans in place so they aren't starting from scratch during an emergency. You'll occassionaly see comments like "I'm stocked up so my family is fine while all the city people are eating each other" but (anecdatally having lived in heavily Mormom areas most of my life) the vast majority do not feel that way. Even some of the people who I've heard said that, I'd bet a huge amount they would not sit by and watch another human starve
toast0 1 day ago||
They may begrudge the 'city people', but they probably won't begrudge their neighbors. It's also nice to have someone to help eat your disaster food :) I've done small preparations before, and you've got to cycle it out for freshness every so often[1], which means someone has to eat it... might as well be you and your neighbors. If you're in a community of like minded, well prepared neighbors, maybe you can get some variety at least.

[1] My elementary schools had a good program of bring in canned food at the start of the school year in case of emergency, have a picnic to eat it in the last month of school. I also did have a disaster can when I lived in California; I'm less prepared at the moment.

throwaway31131 1 day ago|||
That’s a good point I hadn’t considered.
glxxyz 1 day ago||||
I think about that too. My home is isolated with plenty of firewood, well water, solar power and a backup whole house generator with weeks/months of propane. I'm unlikely to last more than a few days into the apocalypse without it all being taken from me by someone stronger or better armed.
oceanplexian 1 day ago||||
I'm in Utah and the idea isn't that you're going to be a lone wolf and somehow survive in a bunker then come out in 6 months. The point is that you should have plenty of extra supplies on hand for your family, friends, and neighbors. Instead of a mob people are more likely going to work together instead of fighting over a bag of rice.
recursive 1 day ago|||
No reason not to solve the smaller problem though.
abdullahkhalids 1 day ago||||
This is why it's important to build a diet with grains and beans. They are cheap and last for months/years at home if stored properly. So you can easily have enough stored at home to eat for at least a few weeks.
downrightmike 1 day ago|||
After covid, we keep a stock of extra dry goods on hand. If you need that much milk, it can just be frozen when found on sale. As long as it completely defrosts, you don't get any ice
ars 1 day ago||
You can also get shelf stable, canned, or powdered milk. That way you have it even with a power outage.
freedomben 1 day ago||
A Camp Chef or Turkey fryer is also a great investment for this purpose as they are very useful on their own, and double as a gas-powered source for cooking in an emergency. They can also boil large pots of water quickly should you need
arlort 1 day ago|||
They're realistically not preparing for a zombie apocalypse

If power goes out really bad, there's some kind of major weather event in some part of the country etc 3 days is a reasonable time frame for emergency measures to be put in place

mopsi 1 day ago||
Three days is realistic timeframe for restoring power and rudimentary network connectivity.
3eb7988a1663 1 day ago||
Does this just mean bags of rice/beans? 10kg of rice will store quite a while and provide many days of food.
jopsen 1 day ago|
The sensible thing would be to store more of existing non-persishables and then cycle through to other stores.

10kg bags of rice is not a common supermarket item in Denmark.

jeffrallen 1 day ago||
Having a government operated emergency stock and a military with the capacity to move it is how Switzerland does it.

And we stock coffee too, not just grain. :)

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/mandatory-reserves_why...

4ggr0 1 day ago|
they (the gov) also provide a calculator which shows you how much stuff you need for your household for a given amount of days :)

https://www.notvorratsrechner.bwl.admin.ch/en

elzbardico 1 day ago||
Item #388293 of things that would never happen in America.

During the Cold War, even the Soviet Union had better missile defense and civil defense infrastructure than the US.

chiph 1 day ago||
By treaty, both sides were limited in missile defense. The Soviets placed theirs around Moscow (to hell with the krest'yanin), while the US placed them around larger cities (also likely targets but this diffused the effectiveness of the system).

Civil Defense was taken seriously in the US for a while (I was trained as a radiological monitor in high school) but fatalism and optimism took over. Countries like Switzerland made changes to their national building code requiring all homes and larger buildings to have shelters. IMO the US should have standardized shelter plans as an optional part of our building code, so if someone wants one, there's a proven design available.

With regard to Denmark, look to the Mormon Church. They have a mandate (not always followed!) to keep a years supply of food in the house. So the church has distribution warehouses and publishes information about long-term storage.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/topics/food-storage/long...

elzbardico 1 day ago||
Thanks for your informative comment. For real.
freedomben 1 day ago||
On a nationwide scale, yeah probably not, but nor do I think it should be done at the federal level. You could get economies of scale on purchasing and storage, but I suspect there would be more inefficiencies emergent from such a large scale thing than would be worth it. Each geographic area has very different needs, very different population makeups, and more, so somebody local is much better equipped to evaluate and plan. Even just "how much water to store" varies immensely. If you're on a water shed in an area with frequent rainfall, it would be wasteful to store a ton of water, but if you're in a desert water storage is one of the most important things. But even just communication setups like ham radio and designated response personnel is something that needs to be worked out locally.

I've been involved in several different cities emergency preparedness plans though, and there is actually a lot more happening in the US than most people think or know. It rarely if ever makes the news, but it happens.

pogue 1 day ago||
It's a very good idea. I wish we had good ideas in the United States.
hattmall 1 day ago|||
It's a private grocer, it's not like the government is doing it. So anyone could set this up.

It also doesn't even sound like that great of an idea. Is each store going to have enough to serve everyone in the 50km region for 3 days?

dmix 1 day ago||
The better question is will it seriously increase the number of people’s access to goods during an emergency. Or is it just an extra stop for the panic buyers buying up everything in bulk on the way back home on the first day or two before the rest of the people start taking it seriously.

IRL market demands are massive for a western country so it’d require a lot more than a single chain of grocers staying open late. Or more accurately a huge devastating emergency to kill off essential industry like food production/distribution.

ars 1 day ago|||
The US has more good ideas than any other country. Don't be pessimistic, look at how things are actually going and you'll see how the US has more startups, R&D, and new products than any other county.

Also: This might be a good idea for them, but it's not a good idea for the US, the US is not exposed to a level of risk that makes this worth it.

labrador 1 day ago||
[flagged]
sneak 1 day ago||
How are people going to pay for things? With no power or network, card payments stop working, and so do ATMs.
snitzr 1 day ago||
I like anything that adds resilience to a system.
ionwake 1 day ago|
Not sure if this is of interest but I was living in Denmark during the "announcement" that the country was closing flights as COVID was now being taken seriously.

Being somewhat of a "cautious" prepper mentality, though never having really done any prepping, I thought I would walk to the supermarket at night in a suburb of Copenahgen to get some extra tuna just in case. Mind you this was about an hour after the announcement say 8pm.

There was a queue of about 30 meters out of the supermarket of danish citizens, scared and ( possibly for the first time ever thought as a visitor I couldnt know for sure - the queue had ever been so long. As I walked away I could see through the window, that they were limiting the amount of people going into the store to a handful at a time.

And, very suprisingly I saw a normal Dane running round the aisle grabbing the milk cartons so quickly he knocked some onto the floor before continuing to run off down the aisle. Very movie like so to speak. Not something I ever saw in the UK during the same announcement a month earlier. Bear in mind this was also at night! A night food panic.

Well, the good news, is ( other than this one incident that lasted an hour or so), the Danes IMO handled the whole COVID thing with a stable level headed attitude, that night was the only mild panic I witnessed.

Months later they had a very honed and IMO fair, calm approach to testing and although teachers were forced to "take the vaccine" or "get into trouble" ( a teacher was expected to show they had taken it or a test or they simply coudln't be in school, thought the punishment was never explained), they were also the only country I noticed where if you were not vaccinated yet , you could still go to cafes as long as you had a "free" test in one of the many marquees around the city. ( To compare, in the UK for about half a year ALL cafes were closed, and it was mandatory to wear masks in public - not so in Denmark). One old lady started shouting at me whilst I drank coffee ( below my mask), on a train in the UK. When I asked her to calm down and stop shouting, that masks were not even worn in Denmark, she actually got extremely confused. (Just a memory.)

I just thought this was of interest. Clearly they are still trying to learn lessons. Good stuff.

EDIT> Sorry and my one funnny memory ( Im not complaining honest). Was a time in Denmark when it was (a) Cafe was open (b) You could go to cafe if you had been tested (c) You were given a literal FLAG that you would put on your table to warn other poeple you had ben tested but NOT vaccinated. A little white flag!!! Only once, I think that was at it worst, and about a month later I never saw the little flag again. Ah good times though.

jandrewrogers 1 day ago|
I was in Denmark at the time they announced they were closing flights. I was flying out the next day. My experience was orderly, as I would expect, but things took on a strange vibe.
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