I visited the big Cabela’s in FW/Dallas and then a few supermarkets.
It was surprising in all of them the abundance of just about anything. Shelves full of ammo (and cheap!) as well as all kind of gear. Same thing in supermarkets, huge family packs for little money compared to what I’m used to. Over here in Argentina everything is smaller and more expensive.
There’s also much less variety of everything. I’d say 1/10 or 1/20 of what you guys have at least. We have chesse, muzzarela ofr pizza and a couple other, maybe four or five more in a bigger store. In a walmart in USA there’s dozens of varieties, maybe hundreds.
You guys are used to seeing all that as normal, it really isn’t.
The same translated to other areas as well. We don’t get soda drink refills here in any diner or fast food store. You just get one cup, small medium or large, and that’s all you get. (and of course its more expensive and more diluted with water).
I went to Starbucks in College Station and asked for a small coffee… they didn’t have any. The smallest they had was “medium”, and the medium is about twice the size of a large coffee in Argentina.
The abundance and excess of everything isn’t bad, but I can see how it can spoil people, specially if they don’t know any better or think that normal.
The comparison of relative scarcity FerFAL makes is significant because what he is experiencing now in Argentina is essentially a preview of what's to come in the US. Argentina experienced it's own mass inflation, massive political corruption and the ensuing civil unrest and most Argentinians continue to linger in a state of day-to-day hardship and general unease following the economic collapse and the confiscatory interventions by the Argentinian government.
The days of near overabundance of almost every good and service Americans have become accustomed to enjoying will soon be but a glee-filled memory of the past. A darker, scarcer future awaits as not only more and more previously "middle class" people and families find themselves to have dropped several rungs on the economic ladder, but everyone in every economic strata will have to make do with paying more for less.
"The modern survival manual : Surviving the economic collapse" should be mandatory reading.
ReplyDeleteIt sort of gives you some perspective to first get told how you should best store water and food in case of an emergency, and then read advice on how to gut someone with a jagged knife as guick as possible and realize that this is the sort of thing that you have to learn for your own safety when things hit the fan.