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Category: prepping

Tues. Feb. 1, 2022- 02012022 – more work, more stuff to do, more MOAR!

Cool and damp again?  Rained yesterday.  Had to drive all over town and back in the rain doing my pickups.  Didn’t get the violent downpour that the weather liars were predicting, but did get some.

So I did my pickups as soon as they were open and made it back to pick up D2 for some together time.  We couldn’t find the stuff for the project she wanted to do in her bedroom, so she taught me how to play chess instead.  WEEEELLLLLLLL……  Taught me how to move the pieces anyway.  Mom says I played as a young kid, but I don’t have any memory of it.  May be that I lost it after one of the blows to the head?  Don’t know, can’t worry about it.  Had fun.  Played two games and she beat me both times.  She loved it.  D1 got home from school and that was that, but I had her for over an hour, all to myself.   Because of holidays from school and the trip up to the lake house, I missed the last couple of weeks.  And jeez, I’m happy about a single hour…   which is kinda F’ed up when you think too much about it.

Anyway, busier than a one armed paper hanger today.   This morning I’m headed to my client’s house.  Painters are there, and I need to pull a few TVs down to keep them safe and paint free.  Also, they’re having some network issues that I need to look at.   Then back to town to finish my pickups.   More stuff for the house and for my shop.  I got a ‘tombstone’ stick welding machine for about half to one quarter of what they normally go for, and I’ve always wanted one.  They are great for heavier steel welding that MIG really isn’t the best choice for.  Granted that in the shop I’ve also got a Miller 250 welding machine and it has the capacity to do some pretty heavy welding in steel and even heavy welds in aluminum with the spool gun, the stick welder and some long leads let you do  a bunch of stuff that is much harder with the MIG process.  Working outside on a fence is just one example, or a dock…

So how to slickly transition to a prepper topic???  Well, I’ve talked before about fixing things, and making things as a valuable skill any time, but especially in hard times.   If you can build stuff you can make it for yourself and save money, fix it yourself and save the replacement or repair costs, or make and fix stuff for other people.  Here in the oil patch, I’m the least likely guy to bust out a welder and fab up something big, but I’ve made a ton of smaller stuff for myself and occasionally for others.  I built the security bar door for my rent house, for example.   I made it in a style that complimented the craftsman style of the door and it came out really well.   I’ve made furniture for the house, some that we still use every day.   I’ve made or modified tools for my workshop, and fixed tools as well.

This new welding machine will just extend capabilities I have, and possibly make some ‘field’ work much easier.   Working in metal isn’t any harder than working in wood, but the tools and techniques are different.

Whatever you have an interest or skill in making, or repairing, or building, I encourage you to get the tools and some supplies while you can, if you don’t already have them.   It can be as simple as sewing by hand in leather, cloth, or web gear, or as complicated as 3D printing parts that aren’t available any more, due to supply chain or obsolescence.   Timber frame construction, and hand wood work might be very useful if things go very far down the slope.    There are some really interesting youtubers doing “green wood” or “traditional hand woodworking” or “bodging” that demonstrate the very high levels of functionality you can get in a ‘world built by hand’.

It doesn’t have to cost much.  I get leather and cloth at the goodwill and the goodwill surplus for pennies.  Purses, leather coats, leather clothes, belts, wallets, even boots, all provide raw materials.  So do bed sheets, blankets, and most commonly, curtains and window treatments.  A pair of work pants might not fit, but the heavy cotton duck or denim can be used for patching and reinforcing your pants.   So many backpacks, book bags, and duffles are in the surplus bins that all can provide donor material for repairs to your gear or customizations.  You can salvage buckles, straps, pads, and webbing from them too.

I grab small pieces of wood at thrift stores too.  They are usually a walnut serving tray or a piece of teak used as decor, or some other nice but small wooden object.  $1.20 per pound, and I’ve got some really nice walnut for small projects.  There are a number of things you can reuse the plastic material of cutting boards for, like wear pads, or friction reducing pads.  There are almost always plastic and wooden cutting boards at the thrifts.

You need the tools to take advantage of the materials, and the skills to make something useful.  It’s not hard though.  And if you are working with junk, or something already broken, the cost of failure is low.

Get some tools and try doing some things.   While the resources are still abundant.

And stack what you need.  Two is one, and one is none.

nick

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Tues. Jan. 25, 2022 – knowing when to pull the trigger…

Cool and wet.  Damp at a minimum.  Misty rain most of yesterday with occasional downpours depending on where you were.  Where I was it rained pretty much non-stop, just slacking for short periods.

Spent the day getting ready then driving north to look at a property.   It’s pretty much what we expected, and we’re making an offer on it.  It’ll be another house that sold “before it was ever listed.”   We only learned about it through a friend.  Meatspace and tribe came through.

I expect there will be a LOT of things to share about the process and the work.  This is intended to be a ‘weekend’ or vacation home, but will also function as a retreat if we need it.  I hate to think ‘bug out location’ because you don’t get much use from a bug out place if things go well.   It does give us somewhere to go if we need to go, and that has been a major prep that was missing from our capabilities.

It’s also supposed to be a financial move to get something real instead of a rapidly inflating currency.  Our timeline is long.  If the world somehow manages to not go to helI in the next year or two, it will be a fun place to go on summer weekends and lakefront property always finds buyers, if there are any buyers at all.

Which brings me around to the title of the post (which most of the time is an opportunity to sneak in a joke or quick hit commentary,  or is totally unrelated to the post, which is a tiny little joke in itself) and relates to CommanderZero’s post today.   How do you know when it’s time to pull the cord and bail?  ESPECIALLY when that moment hasn’t come despite looking like it was imminent any number of times, and when the consequences for NOT going can be dire.  I’ve mentioned in other contexts that ‘if you think it’s time to leave, it’s probably too late…”  And I’ve mentioned that it helps to set trigger points so that you don’t have to second guess yourself.

But specifically, how the heck can I be willing to spend the money on this place after a day, and seeing it for only a couple of hours?  Weeeeelllllll……  because we’ve done lots of thinking about it before hand.   We have been looking at lake properties for three years.   We feel like we’ve got a pretty good understanding of the current pricing and current demand.  We’ve been looking at houses for a lot longer than that, and have a lot of confidence we can evaluate the condition and potential of the property.  We had the money in place, and although we had to revisit that, another year of putting money aside for the purpose made the pot big enough, as it turned out.   It’s still a stretch, but my wife agrees that time is getting short, the money we had saved was losing value every day, and we’re not getting younger, and the kids aren’t either.

I had a similar situation with my replacement truck.  By the time this one came up, I’d looked at a lot of trucks, knew a good price when I saw it, and knew I needed to act swiftly.  The house we live in took only a few minutes to convince us this was the house for us, mainly because we’d looked at more than 60 and rejected them.

And in the case of my truck, along with our previous ALMOST purchase of the prepper retreat, we were ready to change our minds if the information or our needs changed.  The first truck I almost bought, I didn’t understand the warranty situation.  Once I did, we bailed on the deal.   With the great looking property with all the animal protein, and smokehouse, and artesian well… once we understood where the flood line was, and that the property was unbuildable for the most part, and that we wouldn’t ever be able to sit on a dock watching the sunset, we bailed.

Be ready to move when the opportunity presents itself.  But be ready to stop moving if things change, or you change.

Finally, in answer to CommanderZero’s question, when do you head for the hills and burn the bridges and boats behind you?  I’ve got a rule that none of my prepping can be irrevocable. Even if I decide to head for the hills I’m going to do my best to not burn the bridges behind me.  Because I make mistakes.  Lots of them and all the time.  And I believe that “there is ALWAYS another way.”  Searching for and finding that way made my career.    Those two things make me strongly biased against the dramatic exit…  and so far it’s worked for me.

 

The other thing that works for me is stacking up the preps, because it gives me choices.  Give yourself some, and stack up your own preps.  You know you wanna….

 

nick

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Sun. Jan. 23, 2022 – 01232022 – silly, I know.

Cold and clear.  Was 34F when I went to bed.  Didn’t get very warm during the day, probably won’t today either. Pretty sure we froze at some point, but I’ve got the citrus indoors, and I’m hoping nothing is negatively affected.

Did some more cleanup on the old family pc.  I’d previously upgraded it with an SSD and it breathed new life, along with making the RAM and adding a second drive for data… but the main reason for retiring it (technically anyway, the real reason was the newer $8 pc I picked up) was that the SSD was full and it’s a pain to manage where stuff goes on it.

Well.  I killed more than half the drive’s capacity which was taken up with LOG FILES from failed updates.  150GB of pure crap was filling the drive.  And windows ‘drive cleanup’ tool doesn’t even look for the files.  WinDirStat identified the biggest files, and where they were, and I deleted them.  Just like that the PC is usable again.   I went looking because windows update was failing with useless error messages.  It sure looked to me like the updates were failing when they tried to make a restore point, because the drive was full.

After making space, update found 23 more updates to apply under ‘safety and security’, so I did those and it updated without an issue.  Freaking windows storing cr@p and failing with useless errors.

Now I’ve got to look for the same sorts of things on this, my primary desktop.  I bet it’s full of cruft too.

— spent the evening watching Bukaroo Bonsai with D1.  She laughed and enjoyed it.

The at bedtime we had a long philosophical discussion.   Kid’s smart but since we’re not religious, she doesn’t  have a framework she can fit the more mystical workings of the universe into…  And old movies give us plenty to discuss regarding PC language, wokeness, and changing times.  She’s anti-wokeness.  The kids are starting to back lash against it.  They’re tired of saying the opposite of what their eyes tell them.  Interesting times.

Took some stuff to my secondary, and spent some time stacking stuff on a pallet for auction.   Monday I’ll be talking to another auction company about consigning a truck full of stuff with them.  They definitely do ‘estate sale’ type stuff, and it sells, if not always for highest dollar.   They just moved to a bigger, and empty warehouse space so the time to strike is now.

Ordered some powdered cream for the stacks.   It was finally back in stock.   The powdered cream, butter, and cheese all do age out.  They get hard and lumpy, and get an ‘old’ flavor, so I need to rotate them, even if it means wasting them.  I won a ‘seed display’ in one auction too.  It looks like it’s about half flowers, half veg.  We’ll see if it was worth the money when I pick it up.  Seeds aren’t cheap.

Don’t forget to stack up  the little things that make all the other things better, like butter and cream.   Stack the things.

 

nick

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Fri. Jan. 21, 2022 – or 01212022 – another week slid by, yet this month is really long…

Cold, but I don’t know yet how cold it will get, or how cold it got.  It was 35F when I went to bed.  It is supposed to be clear today anyway, and tomorrow as well.

Mostly spent yesterday poking at things.  I did get to the grocery store, and noted in comments that  there were big gaps in the shelves in several areas.   Cat food and cold and flu OTC meds being the most prominent.

Today should be more auction and ebay stuff. If the weather stays clear I’ll go to my storage unit and clean and sort.  If not, I’ll do some more ebay stuff here at the house.  I’ve got stuff to test and clean and list.   Last night I had stuff sell in the auction by the guy who changed his mind about taking all of my stuff.   I think I did well with LPs and with books, of all things.  There were a couple of collectibles that didn’t do badly, and there was some stuff that sold for $1, but  at least it’s gone.

I hope he’ll be happy and take another load right away.

This afternoon and evening, my wife and D2 will be joined by the rest of her troop and they’ll be off to GS camp for a Gymkana, whatever that is.   The hope is sports on horseback, and related to horses.  Hard to be sure from the GS description.  Friday and Saturday night away, home Sunday afternoon.  That leaves me with D1 and a bunch of work to do.  We’ll see how that goes.  Cookie season is in a week or two, so the last bits have to be out of the house to make way.  Of course that was supposed to have already happened, but …  plans vs reality.

While I was at the grocery, I did add a flat of canned peas to the stacks,  6 pounds of bacon, and some pork chops and loin.  Beef was in short supply and none was on sale.  A little voice keeps poking me to add alternatives to fresh milk.  I have a bunch of Lido powdered full fat, and we don’t use as  much as we did a year ago, but I think I’ll add more.   It keeps fairly well.   I should open an old can and see how it’s doing.  For science or something.   But seriously, when I get little pokes from the universe like I’ve been getting about the milk, I ignore it at my peril.   YMMV but I’ll be checking the old and adding some new.

Anyone else getting weird vibes or feel short of something?

If you do, stack it up.

nick

 

BTW, I’ve now been doing this officially for 4 years ( a bit longer if you count the days I was just filling in for Bob while he was sick), without missing a day that I can remember.  Some days the end product was pretty weak, but at least the lights were on and the door unlocked.  All y’all are the reason I do it, to keep this unique thing that Bob built alive.  Thanks for sticking around and making this place somewhere I enjoy spending my time.  And thank you Barbara for letting us, and Rick for making it all work.  We’ve got a rocky road ahead, but we’re all better prepared for it than we were, and we will get through it.

n

 

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Wed. Jan. 19, 2022 – coming up on an unhappy anniversary…

Cool but not cold? Still probably damp, and we might be on the edge of some rain… but we usually don’t get any when the national forecast shows us on the edge. 63F when I went to bed last night.

Did mostly pickups yesterday. Got cleaning supplies, and stuff for the house. Picked up another portable room A/C. Like heat up north, A/C is a prep for hurricane season down here. Having a couple of extras can be a good thing both for redundancy and for helping out a neighbor. Meatspace, remember? And they are MUCH cheaper in the middle of winter than in the middle of summer. Funny that the same can be said for Mr Heater propane heaters, only with the seasons reversed.

Good advice to buy at a discount in the off season. Works for a lot of things that will last. Fruit, not so much. Knowing what to buy and when can really save some money. Google the best time to buy appliances, etc. and if you have flexibility, you can save. That is also kind of the essence of prepping, to have choices and flexibility.

Buying stuff should be on your radar. It might be a while, but we’ll eventually end up like Soviet Russia, where you got in line for whatever was available, and hoped you could trade it for what you needed later. That’s the path anyway. Who knows, something might happen to take us off it, aliens could reveal themselves and hand out matter transformers… but that’s pretty far down my scenario list. (and it would be disruptive as hell anyway)

Take a look at what you didn’t buy this past year, and see if you need to buy it now. How’s the elastic in your underwear holding up? Socks getting thin? Got some spare ‘cheater’ glasses in the drawer? Need some new work boots? Figure it out and get stacking.

nick

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Wed. Jan. 12, 2022 – worse, not better. “There’s a lot of ruin in a country…”

Cool and damp again, maybe a little rain… we got just a few drops at the end of the day yesterday. The rest of the day was rain free if still damp-ish and overcast.

That meant I was able to take a load to the auctioneer. But. I loaded the truck about 3/4 of the way from one unit, and moved to the other unit, thinking that I’ll just grab the quick and easy stuff from both. Very strange. My lock is gone, and there is another lock on my unit. Office is closed on Tuesday but they agree to send a manager from a nearby storage facility, because storage companies ADD a lock to the unit if there is an issue. They don’t cut YOUR lock. There were some other ‘tells’ too. All of the company locks have a little blue sticker on them and this one didn’t. No issues with the unit were in the file, and I know I paid online…

In the mean time, I take my partial load to the auctioneer, and he freaks. This is all he wants this week. WTF? We had a long conversation, he was gonna take it all. Well, not so much. It’s possible the big boss objected or knew they had other stuff coming in. In either case, I don’t get to empty any storage,nor move much from the house.

On my way back to storage, the manager calls and will meet me there. I swing by home to get a new lock, and grab my battery grinder just in case.

Met the guy and we cut the lock. Ransacked. Robbed. Burgled actually. From the door I could see they went through most of the bins, tossing them around, and grabbing what they wanted. I haven’t disturbed the mess yet as I’m hoping for a police investigation, but I can see the golf clubs are gone, as well as a huge subwoofer, and every bit of electronics. They got at least $1000 in resell value, and that’s just what I can see at first look.

The facility manager is going to look at video for the last week. When she finds something, I’ll call the cops or the constable’s office, and try for an investigation. This is a pretty sophisticated operation. They have surely hit more than my unit as there were a LOT of units with the disc locks on them. They broke in, stripped out what they wanted, then put a lock on the door to disguise the entry. For most renters, I’m sure it would be weeks or months before the theft was discovered, and any video would be long gone.

This is the second time in as many months the one of my storage units has been broken into. In the other facility, a tenant cut locks in a hallway and entered a bunch of units. Caught on video. My unit had only networking and industrial stuff, so they didn’t steal anything. The management noticed the cut locks, and investigated. Then called me and let me know what happened. I met a real nice guy (and mentioned it here at the time) when I went to verify my stuff was still there.

I’ve been a storage unit renter for decades. Not all at once, but cumulatively, and I’ve had the ones here for a while. I’ve never had an issue before. Never heard of anyone having issues with theft, and certainly not a thief who hides the crime with his own lock. This is a big change.

Add in the other indicators. Supply chain issues and shortages. Inflation. Street violence. Political violence. Silencing opposing views. Increasingly ‘othering’ rhetoric and demonizing of opposing groups. Rule of law is collapsing. Social norms are fraying. Everything is getting worse. And I don’t see it stopping anytime soon.

Yeah I know, doom and gloom. The sky is falling. The end is near(er)… But tell me where I’m wrong. I’d love to be wrong.

Look to your personal security and physical security. Look to your personal supply chain. When you see it, buy it. And stack it high.

nick

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Tues. Jan. 11, 2022 – 01112022 – hah, base 3 biatchezzz (so nerdy)

Another cool and clear day today, or at least that is what I need. Yesterday was fine with some sun and no rain.

And yesterday I spent the day working on my client’s stuff. Watched some vids about ubiquiti unifi, and then went and installed some. The magic is still not auto.. but we’re closer, and it’s working from the end user’s point of view. I’m not done yet, but I’m done for a couple of days.

Today I’m moving stuff to the auctioneer and I need it to not rain. Open pickup truck, bins of stuff for sale, and p!ssing down rain don’t mix. If I can get most of the first storage unit delivered, I’ll be happy. That will let me move more out of the house and garage and patio. Wife will be happy. If I can do more than that I’ll be really happy. Then more the next day… and so on, and so on, and so on.

As I dig out more radio stuff, I’m debating whether to take it all to him and do a special ‘radio’ auction, or just wait for March and do my usual sale at the Hamfest. I really like seeing and interacting with everyone at the Hamfest, and I worry that it will all go too cheaply in an auction. I have some time to decide though.

I’m getting that “time is short” feeling again. 100# of rice is about $60-75 (instead of $50 like 2 years ago), fills a couple of buckets, and would bulk out dinner for the family for 2-3 months. $100 in canned veg wouldn’t go amiss… nor would 60 pounds of animal protein- but that bill is gonna hurt.

There are a couple of other things I really need to make some plans work, some additional meds, and some solar charge controllers being the most critical.

If stuff starts getting sporty it will get sporty pretty suddenly. Don’t delay, prep today!

Stack all the things.
nick

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Mon. Jan. 10, 2022 – another busy week ahead

Cool and clear, damp but later drying out, I hope. Yesterday was damp and overcast all day. Not much dried, and there was a lot of standing water around the house and yard. Never got particularly warm, although the house warmed up to the point I turned the A/C on. It was 55F when I went to bed, and still 84%RH.

Spent the day indoors anyway. Slept in after being up late keeping an eye on the storm. The tornado warning that I ignored resulted in a tornado in Humble, about 15 miles NE of me, and it did some damage. Went right over my head before forming up apparently.

Other than the mud where the high water mark is, you wouldn’t know there was any flooding last night.

After a leisurely brunch of sliced Spam, fried frozen hash brown patties, and for me, an egg, I spent the rest of the afternoon doing a bit of clean up, restocking the house, and I cut my hair. I’ve been giving myself haircuts since the beginning of the chinaflu lockdown. I’m getting faster at it, although I’m not sure I am better at it. The Wahl clippers have paid for themselves several times over at this point. Yep, I bought them as a prep when I considered how to stay home for months at a time.

I wanted to go back to my normal barber, but he lost his lease to gentrification and I’ve got to find him again. In the mean time, it’s faster for me to do it. Clipper cut with the numbered clipper shields makes it relatively easy, and it’s basically the same cut I was getting from the barber for years, #4 on top, #2 on the sides, blend and clean up the edges… it’s a style that suits me and it’s easy to maintain. Like a lot of simplification and cutting back, it fits with the circumstances.

I’ve got a set of hair scissors and a straight razor too. The razor is a DEEP fall back as I normally get several months of infrequent use from every disposable blade set. The scissors would work for the girls too. Deep prep. But easy to buy, store, and have if needed. Cutting the kids’ hair or gnu forbid, the wife’s, is NOT something I’m going to practice though. I’ll just accept that if things are that desperate, I can’t make them much worse even if I have to ‘learn on the job.’

Hygiene and grooming are important. People feel better when they’re clean and look good. And morale is important. Make sure you have prepped for that too.

One more pile of things to add to the stacks!

n

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Sun. Jan. 9, 2022 – better clean the house before people get home… certain people…

Cool and wet. We got hammered in my part of town yesterday. I had 4 inches of rain in a few hours at my house by the time I got to bed, and the surrounding area had the same or more. My local drainage ditch/creek was over the banks at the sensor location, not all that far from my house. ~4 inches in 2 hours will do that. I’ll look at the totals later today.

Did most of my errands yesterday before the rain hit. Got my local auctioneer to agree to take my first load of stuff Tuesday morning. Went by my secondary and dropped a couple of items there. Missed the school open house. Ate donuts instead of lunch. And smaller child lost at basketball (and lost a tooth, the third in a month.)

The rain started in the afternoon. We got hammered with some really hard downpour during the b-ball game, but gauges said only 0.33 inches. Then it cleared up for a while, but started hammering down again around 11pm. At 1am, several gauges in my area had over 5 inches in 12 hours and ~4.5 in the previous three. That’s a lot of rain, even by Houston standards. And it was VERY localized. Having access to almost real time data for the whole county, both channel levels and rainfall is a miracle of the modern age. I looked at the weather radar, looked at the rainfall gauges, looked at the channel levels (water level in creeks and bayous) and was able to make some very well informed decisions. One was to move my truck from the street to the driveway (up hill 18″.) I should have done it earlier as the street was flooded to the running boards. At least it didn’t flood to the floorboards. Still, I’ll have to look at the lube in the differential. If my diff has a breather valve and it goes underwater, water can get in, or so I’ve been told. Further down the street if there were cars on the street they got flooded.

Just a VERY local disaster for a few people, unless there will be more flooding downstream as all that water leaves the system… and no one cares about the tiny disasters except the people in them.

Watching the storm effects kept me up later than I wanted to be. So I’m sleeping in later too. Then smaller child and I better get some stuff picked up around the house. I’d like to get some more stuff put away, a couple of things tested and listed for ebay, and put some more things in the pile for Tuesday morning. And it’s always nicer if my wife comes home to a clean house…

I’m pretty sure at least a few of my neighbors went to bed without a care, and woke up to flooded cars or even homes downstream from me. Very personal and local disasters. Stacks of Mountain House won’t be much use, but stacks of $100 bills, paid up insurance, cleanup supplies, and other preps will. It’s not always TEOTWAWKI. Sometimes it’s just the end of this thing, right here and right now, and only for us that is the disaster we’re prepping for.

Stack something today.

nick

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Thur. Jan. 6, 2022 – working today, because money can’t buy love, but it can buy stuff.

Warmer and sunny, clear. Yesterday was nice, if a bit humid. Sunny for a couple more days too.

Spent yesterday doing a bunch of local errands, then went to my client’s house to do some work notes. The programmer had an issue on another job and couldn’t make it, so he’s coming today. I spent some time troubleshooting, and determined that a home theatre receiver needs to be replaced. It’s the oldest gear in the rack, and doesn’t support 4K resolution, so its time was limited. My business partner was very skeptical that we’d be able to find a reasonable replacement due to supply issues. And indeed, directly comparable gear is months backordered and expensive. I was able to find something that will work at BestBuy. They have one per store in stock, and I can pick it up today. I also found 1 on amazon with 2 day delivery. It was cheaper, but the programmer is here today. Worth the extra $100 to have it in the rack so he can integrate it with the control system.

VERY few AV receivers are available anywhere, what is available is either very low end, or very high end. Too cheap to use, or too dear for most people. We’ve had other supply issues on this job. We had to upgrade the in room control touch panels because the cheaper button panels were not available. I’ve talked before about buying every IR emitter in the store and every mono 1/8″ plug, and them not being restocked in weeks…

I stopped at lowes for headlight bulbs for my wife’s minivan. Over the weekend I noticed they had bins of them on closeout, huge price reductions, and I just noticed her headlight was out. That’s how my life works. I got a set for her minivan, and a set for each of my trucks. $5 a pair was too cheap to resist. While I was there I confirmed that they don’t have a seed display up. They had one small rotating display of a couple dozen seed packets for “organic” seeds, but it had mostly herbs left. NO big burpee display. No Martha Stewart or other cheaper seeds. There were large empty areas in the store too. Whole pallet racks filled with individual empty bins so they weren’t actually empty.

And we’ve talked about grocery and retail stores re-organizing the stores to hide shortages. Well what I saw at Costco yesterday left me quite disturbed. Costco has leased ships to try to shortcut some of the supply chain issues. They are very good about getting product in the stores. And yet. Yesterday I realized that they had removed an entire aisle of cold food display coolers. They moved the remaining aisles farther apart and REALLY opened up the space in cold meat and prepared foods… They went to smaller coolers too. I confirmed with the employee at the door checking receipts that they had removed the coolers and reconfigured the remaining coolers. He said “they’re having trouble getting what they need, and had to disguise the missing product.” The medicine and supplement section had also gotten wider aisles and less product. In fact the whole store was feeling weirdly open. All the displays were shorter. I could easily see across the store. They even had a shelf of marked down Christmas gifts in the back corner of the store. Costco NEVER has markdowns or shelves with a couple of out of season items on it.

Think about this for a minute. Costco, despite their market power, despite leasing their own ships to help bypass supply chain issues, decided to reconfigure the store with FEWER coolers, and smaller displays. They spent money to move electrical, drains, chiller lines, and get new coolers. You don’t DO that if you think the shortages are temporary. You don’t move utilities if you think things will be better in a month or two. They are betting real money that they’ll be dealing with reduced inventory for a long time. If that isn’t your wake up call, what will it take?

Take a serious look at what you need for the next couple of years. Start looking for it now, and buy it if you see it. Be flexible with what you want, and start learning about other places to look where you might find it. I would prefer to get pro gear for my client. I had to get consumer product, and I had to look outside my normal suppliers. I also had to pay more than I would have a year ago when we were discussing the project. Start looking around for the secondary markets near you. Auctions, thrift and outlet stores, estate and yard sales, fleamarkets, bodegas, ethnic stores, mom and pop storefronts, street vendors… my partner recommended looking on ebay for a replacement receiver, used and likely priced as new, because his distributors had nothing. For the model we wanted there was ONE for sale, and 4 had recently sold for more than new. Recognize that there might be opportunities for YOU in this new normal if you have access to stuff people want, or can fix the stuff they can’t replace.

Keep stacking it guys and gals. It isn’t getting better soon. The big boys looked at it and spent the money. You need to too.

nick

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