My UPS guy on the economy

[I'm attempting to blog every day for the month of November.]

About a week ago I was signing for a new printer, and my UPS guy asked me out of the blue whether we're stockpiling food. I'd seen this guy several times before, and I figured he'd delivered boxes from Emergency Essentials, Pleasant Hill Grain, BulkFoods.com... that sort of place. So he had a pretty good idea that we have a survivalist bent (although in our case, TEOTWAWKI arises not from nuclear war, Chinese invasion, or fire and brimstone, but currency failure). Mind you, we hadn't gotten any suspiciously survivalist boxes in a long time, and I wondered how long he'd been wanting to ask me this.

So I said yes, and admitted it. He nodded and recommended FoodInsurance.com for freeze-dried food. I recommended EmergencyEssentials.com and explained that our food isn't freeze-dried, it's mostly wheat and rice and dried beans and canned stuff. He said he's also been buying food at the regular old grocery store, stuff like mac and cheese and canned tuna. He explained that his dad lived through the Great Depression and we're headed that way again.

I started to say something about the dollar and he interrupted with "Yeah, they're gonna destroy it unless we can do something about these communists." I told him he could also buy silver, and it turned out he was already doing that. He'd been buying junk silver (old 90% silver dimes, quarters, half-dollars and dollars) because "that's currency, so they can't confiscate that." He was also saving old pennies (before 1982), which are 95% copper.

I mentioned the bankers, and he got on a tear talking about the Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. He and I were mutually amazed that the other one had read it. And shortly thereafter he ran off to his truck, while I stood there realizing that my UPS guy knows more about the current economic situation than most people I know (even if you include the "communists" bit, where in my opinion the better term is "corporatists").

I think it's an excellent idea (if you can manage it) to lay aside food, silver, batteries, blankets, larger sized shoes / boots / coats for growing children, and so on. We don't know exactly what we're facing here, except that it's the end of an empire, and that's never pretty. I hope the idea of taking precautions is spreading.

For my family, this past week's precautionary purchases include two one-liter bottles of lamp oil (we have a very old-fashioned -- in fact, antique -- oil lamp) and two half-gallon jars of raw honey. Honey keeps forever. Oh, and 4 new LED flashlights, which don't eat batteries anywhere near as fast as our old incandescents.

And you?