Danish supermarket chain is setting up "Emergency Stores"

This discussion revolves around the concept of "emergency stores" or enhanced preparedness, exploring various facets from individual responsibility to national security. Here's a breakdown of the key themes:

The "3-Day" Resilience Concept and Its Adequacy

A core point of contention is whether a 3-day preparedness window, often cited in emergency advice or as a standard for these stores, is sufficient. Some find it too short given potential disruptions, while others consider it a reasonable baseline.

• "Three days seems low, but any resilience is better than no resilience." - unethical_ban
• "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." - larholm
• "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." - hadlock
• "3 days is a reasonable time frame for emergency measures to be put in place" - arlort
• "3 days isn't very long, it's reasonable to look at this as a generic resiliency thing rather than response to some identifiable risk." - maxerickson

Individual vs. Collective Preparedness

The conversation frequently contrasts individual responsibility for preparedness (stockpiling food, water, cash) with the role of businesses and governments in ensuring societal resilience.

• Individual Preparedness and "Prepping": Many users shared their strategies for personal preparedness, ranging from stocking extra dry goods to more extensive long-term supplies. The motivations for this range from practical concerns about supply chain disruptions to more existential anxieties.

  • "After covid, we keep a stock of extra dry goods on hand." - downrightmike
  • "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." - bigiain
  • "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." - toast0
  • "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." - abdullahkhalids

• Corporate and Government Roles: There's a debate about whether businesses undertaking such initiatives are acting as a community service or primarily for marketing/business advantage. The role of government in ensuring national reserves and infrastructure resilience is also discussed.

  • "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." - tokai
  • "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." - eddythompson80
  • "Having a government operated emergency stock and a military with the capacity to move it is how Switzerland does it." - jeffrallen

Panic Buying and Hoarding Behavior

The discussion is heavily influenced by recent experiences with panic buying during events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Users debate the causes and consequences of this behavior and whether measures like emergency stores can mitigate it.

• "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." - 14
• "Without limits those with money will buy it up." - 14
• "There was very little paid buying in Denmark, as there were very few selfish people like you buying a years worth of food." - Symbiote (This quote is responding to the user who panic-bought)
• "The idea is that no one should be more than 50 km from such a store and it should prevent hoarding/panic buying as people will know basic food will be available in an emergency." - ksec (quoting the premise of the article)
• "I dont think that is how it works? That is assuming people wont flock out to buy everything in the emergency store." - ksec
• "You can be forgiven however if you're a millennial (as I am) or younger, because the long peace has been so long that it seems crazy that Russia might start dropping bombs, say, on Copenhagen or London. 'They wouldn't dare attack NATO' we would have said 10 years ago. But today, NATO is at risk since too much of its credibility is tied to the US and the US is now unpredictable." - xp84
• "It's basically a prisoner's dilemma, you know you shouldn't panic buy, but if you don't and other people do it's rational to do it." - wisty

The Role of Digital Infrastructure and Cash

The fragility of digital payment systems and telecommunications during outages is a significant concern, leading to discussions about the importance of cash and offline payment capabilities.

• "Without power they could use backup sources but without telecoms isn't payment going to be difficult to impossible? (except those who had sufficient cash before the emergency)" - nmstoker
• "EMV cards can do offline auth" - Maxious
• "When I was a kid, I remember the cashier at a department store checking a book for my mother’s credit card number. I misunderstood the nature of the book, assuming it was a list of valid card numbers. It was, of course, the opposite, so when I said to my mom “I hope they find your number in there” she replied “I hope they don’t!”" - macintux
• "Here in Germany foreigners often scoff about how prevalent cash is, but to this day nobody has yet invented a payment technology that works without electricity, without transaction costs, and without a third party. As far as I'm concerned cash is still the most futuristic technology we ever invented" - barruine
• "Precious metals fill all of your requirements. They do have other challenges, some shared with FIAT, some unique, but we've had the "technology" to solve this problem for thousands of years." - anonym29
• "Swish is great, but it is sensitive infrastructure. It has already been down multiple times due to DDoS attacks (together with BankId). Don't let Swish completely replace a stash of cash at home." - vodou

Geopolitical Tensions and the Threat of War

Several users connect the need for emergency preparedness to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and broader geopolitical instability, particularly concerning Russia's actions and potential threats to Europe.

• "We as a country are exposed to being attacked by Russia. Be that cyber attacks or destruction of assets by sleeper agents." - wojciii
• "This is because of the Ukraine war." - wojciii
• "We are not preparing for war in Europe. Europe is at war with Russia, with all the murders and sabotage acts of the last years." - mschuster91
• "The US is the only Western country with (almost) enough people already enlisted to be a credible threat in a major war." - xp84
• "Denmark's kingdom includes Greenland. It's the 12th largest sovereign country." - Symbiote (This comment adds context to a discussion about geopolitical positioning, noting Denmark's geographical scope.)
• "Denmark is in a crazy situation where what we saw as a key trusted partner (the US) all of sudden is extremely hostile towards us due its re-ignited territorial ambitions in Greenland." - chvid
• "Out of all of EU regions, it has worst life expectancy, alcoholism, suicide rates. There are no roads, rails or any other infrastructure!" - throw7448488 (This comment concerns Greenland's situation, highlighting infrastructure challenges that exacerbate vulnerability.)

The Role of Climate Change and Natural Disasters

The increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters due to climate change are also cited as reasons for heightened preparedness.

• "The climate is changing. Natural disasters are going to be more common. It's prudent to prepare for it." - maxbond
• "Just this last week, all the major cargo train lines in northern Sweden suffered big derailments simultaneously, and several dozen roads were made unusable. This was all from a single incident of unusually heavy rain." - TazeTSchnitzel
• "In the Netherlands the power grid is at capacity, which effectively means new businesses are on a waiting list to get connected; they do that to try and prevent power outages, but it does imply (to me, a layperson) that it wouldn't take much for the grid to get overloaded and shut down." - Cthulhu_

Business Logistics and Inventory Management of Emergency Stores

A practical aspect of the discussion delves into how these "emergency stores" would function from a retail perspective. This includes inventory management, shelf-life concerns, and the economics of maintaining stock.

• "the key is you need to stock shelf-stable products in these stores and at some point in their shelf life, transfer them out to other stores for actual consumption and back fill the emergency stores with fresh lots of new shelf stable products." - 0xWTF
• "Back in my days in retail, we were ordered to put resupply as FILO into the shelfs. It makes sense to sell the oldest products first. So why the transfer shuffle?" - throwawayqqq11
• "It's still FILO, the shuffle is needed for multiple locations. The emergency store keeps (for example) 5x the stock of canned beans, and feeds an area with 4 regular stores. They have 5x more stock then they could regularly sell, so if stock wasn't transferred then the canned beans would expire before they were sold." - zrobotics
• "Personally I wouldn't have a problem with FIFO or LIFO, but the way they manage it is a lot more complicated than I thought." - zrobotics (This comment is a refinement of the previous point about inventory management.)

General Societal Resilience and Trust

Underlying many of these points is a broader concern about the overall resilience of modern, interconnected societies and the level of trust between citizens, corporations, and governments.

• "The way we run our countries is idiotic. Zero resilience. First concern after floods is getting back to job, even before all the water is drained and mud cleaned, because working people live paycheck to paycheck and so on." - mordae
• "Capitalism is incompatible with resiliency." - mordae
• "It’s a private grocer, it's not like the government is doing it. So anyone could set this up." - hattmall
• "What pays for this? If an emergency store costs 10% more to run, and emergencies are only 1 day in 10,000, then prices during emergencies would need to be 1000x normal for it to make business sense." - londons_explore
• "In fat, lazy, individualist countries like the UK and US? No way." - walthamstow (This comment contrasts perceived national characteristics regarding community and preparedness.)