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.

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.

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.

Three days is realistic timeframe for restoring power and rudimentary network connectivity.

I read this two or three times and have no idea what you are trying to convey.

> That is assuming people wont flock out to buy everything in the emergency store.

Well, you could make everything really expensive in these emergency stores during an emergency.

We all saw what happened with Covid and panic buying. I remember when initial reports about it started coming out and something about it told me this might actually become something serious. So I went and loaded up on flour and yeast, rice, cooking oil, lots of non perishable items and a bunch of meat in a huge costco run before it took off. I had enough to last me a good year if my family had to ration. Then it spread like fire and people went crazy. I remember being at costco for a couple things I didn't think to stock pile (toilet paper) and there was virtually no meat left on the shelf. They had to queue the door as so many people were there to panic buy.

So if an event happened that even slightly appeared to suggest things might get tough for a while people will always panic buy. Without limits those with money will buy it up.

I did the same thing like a couple years after initial Covid when we had massive flooding in Abbotsford. I heard on the news something like an estimated 100,000 chickens were killed in the flood. I stood up, grabbed my keys and got into my car. I went and bought like a few hundred dollars in chicken. 2 days later facebook was full of posts about how all the chicken is gone and none on the shelves. Luckily it didn't last long and I believe they managed to get a bunch from Washington state but it was all at an increased cost.

I am not rich but I am thankful that I am in enough of a position that I can load up if I feel there might be a need to. A few people said I was part of the problem buying lots like that buy I always did it preemptively before the surge started. And in my defense when you literally could not buy toilet paper, I kept a bunch in my car. I work as a health care working visiting people at home. I gave out dozens of rolls so elderly could have it meaning I would at times run out. I also have helped out countless clients with no food out of my own pocket. But I am the provider for my family so I need to ensure they are okay.

Quotas. My Trader Joe's had a limit of one roll of toilet paper during the pandemic breadlines.

Yeah my impression is shortages are generated by everyone buying _just a bit more_ at once given how so much is just-in-time-y

You can do offline verification of payment cards, there's just higher fees and lower limits on payments.

This is a common way people get their current accounts into debt without authorising an overdraught.