Wanna Talk About Overstock?
Overstock.com, an online Spend Your Money Here! site, announced that it has some hoarding practices and I’m not talking about towels, plastic containers, or old newspapers.
They have $6 million of gold and $4.3 million of silver stored at a secret location in Utah.
And you thought your roll of pre-1964 quarters hidden in your sock drawer was something special.
“I want a system that can survive a three month freeze,” CEO Patrick Byrne told BuzzFeed News. “If the whole thing collapses I want our system to continue paying people, we want to be able to survive a shutdown of the banking system.”
If there’s a shutdown in the US banking system, I’m betting on which people will get paid. It’s probably not the stock boy.
Byrne said the company maintains a 30 day supply of food, and has a distribution system to pay and feed employees in case the banking and payments systems collapse.
All you have to do is get to Utah and be willing to eat silver on day 31.
Another benefit? They can also get you a special guest appearance on Survivalists.
So how do I hey know they have enough gold and silver. Is there some sort of gold to Raman noodle exchange rate we are not aware for? How many Pieces of Eight goes it take to get a case of Diet Coke? Will silver exchange for my Cuban cigars? And hear I thought all the firearms and ammo that I have stockpiled would allow me to just take what I need. Life is getting complicated.
1Let’s see, one more place I can cross off the “shop here” list….
2Unfortunately, Ted Koppel has joined the ranks of the doomsday survivalist with his new book “Lights Out.” He was on the Diane Rehm Show yesterday claiming he had given all of his children and grandchildren a two months supply of freeze dried food. Of course, the right wingers are loving it, using Koppel as an opportunity to bash the weak kneed liberals. He is concerned about the fragility of the electric grid and cyber attacks. Oh well.
3John Peter Henson, if you’re seeking refuge in Utah, yes sir, your life will become considerably more complicated. We here in Nevada consider ourselves the silver state, and as we also border California, we have our eyes on the gold, too. Was a time the MOs would trade their daughters, or barter for your daughters. But there’s a new ‘gold’ standard here in the west. It’s water.
Should the United State of Utah persist in building the nuclear plant that will drain the Green River, expect a reaction from the United State of Nevada as to which sovereign group of armed a-holes is either bigger a-holes or better armed.
John, if you think you’re in for a surprise, imagine what awaits Patrick Byrne, who obviously doesn’t know a regular MO (LDS) from the FLDS.
4I had an argument with this bunch years ago. They don’t honor their warranty. Haven’t used them since then.
5I’ve been reading coin collectors’ magazines for a few years, and y’know what I’ve learned? During difficult times, people don’t spend gold and silver, they hoard it like maniacs. What do they spend? Anything they can find or make up. Look up Hard Times tokens. Civil War tokens. Encased postage stamps. German Notgeld. Depression scrip. Wooden nickels. Clamshell money. All things that people have improvised to keep an economy going.
6If I really believed that such a collapse was a probability, the last thing I would want is for everybody to know that I had a huge stash.
7This is a pretty common sort of thing for Utah; the Mormons insist, if not require, that every family keep a year’s worth of food on hand. It’s one reason houses in SLC are so big… big families and huge pantries.
For pioneers, it no doubt made sense, and it also helped avoid the worst problems of food production gluts and shortages. Given what our GOPer overlords would like to do to our economy, it may be time for the rest of us to start.
8If the economy, power grid, or anything else collapses, you can bet your bottom krugerrand that the right wingers will be behind it. It is easy to be right about the apocalypse when you plan on starting it yourself.
9Which begs the question about how big an arsenal this looney has accumulated to protect that stash. Possibly the only company that has staff retreats for small arms training.
10A coronal mass ejection from the sun, if aimed at Earth, could wipe out the power grid for a long time, but I’m not spending time or money worrying about it, or about big meteorites.
11Funny how the macho, manly super conservatives are scared of just about everything except climate change.
12All good comments. I was saying the other day somewhere else that it might be a good idea since most folks don’t know how to do much of anything not related to computers, classes in how to make friends with neighbors, how to cook with a solar cooker, how to build houses so they have shady porches and big windows that circulate air, how to make sprouts, how to sew/knit/darn socks, how to grow and preserve food including small livestock and fish, how to safely dispose of human waste, how to save and purify water, how to read books by natural light, how to generate electricity at home with solar panels…you know, the stuff our grandparents all did, and now we call it survivalism. Hmmm. Time to subscribe to MOTHER EARTH NEWS.
13Cigarettes and vodka miniatures will be the best trade goods. Can’t eat gold coins . . .
14LynnN…..they can not use a gun to change the weather. So ….not scared
15JJ, right on about not paying the stock boy! This is right to work law type of thinking. We in our family have run into enough of it here in Virginia to last a lifetime. It sucketh swamp water. Hmmm. Why does this remind me of all the gold bars the Nazis hid in caves, you know, all the gold our forces found when the Reich caved in big time.
16Look on the bright side, they haven’t shipped it overseas or to the Caribbean.
17I’ve often wondered what these nimrods plan on doing with all that gold & silver, should our economic system actually collapse. the last I checked, gold & silver, besides being very hard to swallow, have very little nutritional value. so to me, hoarding precious metals, to stave off hunger during a time of chaos and want, isn’t a particularly good investment strategy. I’m a cpa, and I’ve yet to get a straight answer from these people. probably because the “straight answer” would be, “hey, we’re grifters, just trying to make a lot of bucks off the rubes who watch FOX, ok!”
18Gold is pretty soft. Maybe we could carry a brick of gold around with a pocket knife and whittle off a little splinter of it to pay for things. Not sure if we’d get home with it, though. You know, that’s a good character for a story. Senile old man insists he has gold in his pocket….
19I used to work with a Mormon who had a stash of gold coins buried in his back yard. His teenage son dug them up and cashed them in.
20Um… if the banking system collapses, then the economy collapses, thus no one is buying the stuff you are selling, thus your employees aren’t working… but you’re hoarding gold and silver to pay them… for not working… because you’re just really nice guys? This is making my head hurt.
And as for all of your other fears about the failure of the electrical grid… or the food distribution chain… or of law enforcement… or of government in general… may I make a suggestion? How about electing people who want to work to make this country work instead of the lamebrains you vote in who waste time screaming about Benghazi!!… or those damn e-mails… or gutting the ACA!!
I’m just sayin’…
21Suddenly becomes clear why OS nearly went bankrupt/out of business (or maybe still is) over the last couple of years.
Good thing the creditors know where to get payment now.
22Doesn’t anyone remember the story about King Midas? Everything he touched turned to gold; from his throne to his clothing to his children to food and water. Hope this guy figures out a way to eat and drink.
23And I was feeling so good about 8 jars of peanut butter and a dozen boxes of tea in a cupboard in the basement. Maybe I should get some crackers and jam, too.
24Like a lot of people, the wingnuts take a reasonable idea and then run off the cliff with it. Nothing wrong with having a stockpile of nonperishable food…in fact, it’s smart, and it’s what my mother kept, a habit learned from her parents, and them from theirs, and so on. The modern home inventory system, based on the business one, of zero storage, acquiring only as-needed, does not buffer against any problems, from a storm that keeps the delivery trucks from getting to your grocery store to losing your job and having no income until you find another one.
But the notion that any stockpile of food (or money, or gold, or socks, or shoes, or ammunition) is guaranteed to last out your need is…ridiculous. And bragging about what you’ve stored is super ridiculous. And bragging about what you’ve stored and your neighbors haven’t and how you’ll be fine and they won’t is like sitting on a 50 gal drum of gasoline singing “Come on baby, light my fire.”
So is the attitude of “I’m planning for survival; you’re merely hoarding.” Personally, my stockpile of wool yarn will either make me a lot of pretty socks for the rest of my life–or provide the raw material for tradeable wares I can make (socks, hats, mittens…) Skills other than shooting (knitting, baking and other cooking from scratch, use of hand tools, knowledge of first aid) build community. There’s a lot of skills I don’t have–but I’m willing to share the ones I do.
25Marge Wood, I have most (if not all) of those skills. Apart from that, I have a great deal of knowledge about holistic medicine; I’ve studied it most of my life. I’m the kind of person one wants in the community when (as the preppers say) SHTF.
26Still and all, a couple years back I got a pretty good deal at OS for a gel foam mattress topper, and really fast shipping.
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