Fears about the economy and foreign relations are heightened during major elections and commonly cause sales to jump. For example, Mountain House, a freeze-dried food distributor, reported that sales of food made to last for 25 years increased fourteenfold after Hurricane Katrina. Sales spikes occur after natural disasters. Narrator: And market activity backs that up.
It just seems like anything that could translate into a larger dilemma could present itself as a problem. Every flu season that comes around, people worry about some type of a global pandemic. People that call and worry about things like a global economic collapse, there's people that worry about the flu. Hall: They worry about world events and natural events and the things that they see in the news more frequently. Doomsday preppers can also prepare for emergencies with a multitude of survival products ranging from water filters and freeze-dried food to gas masks and emergency power sources. They can choose from converted shipping containers to houses designed to stand up to natural disasters to survival communities with country club amenities. Today's preppers have plenty of survival shelter options. In the '50s and '60s, houses were built with bunkers, and shelters started popping up during the Cold War. Narrator: Doomsday prepping isn't a new idea. Outdoors, you can build an earth-covered shelter, which affords the best protection against blasts, fire, radiation, and radioactive fallout. The project is just one example of success in the growing survival market.Īnnouncer: The basement box-type shelter is stronger, larger, and more comfortable. The idea was so popular that every unit sold before construction ended. Narrator: The infrastructure is designed to sustain 75 people for five years.
Hall: What you really wanna do is make sure that people feel productive, so you're gonna need everyone to be working four-hour workdays, and every 30 days, people will rotate jobs so you don't have any single points of failure and everybody knows how to do all of the jobs there.