The Prepping Thread - A Newer Beginning ;)

Si_Clist

But my point was that an awful lot of these wholesalers and foodservice firms are now only too happy to take our money. Just off the top of my head, places like https://www.jjfoodservice.com/ and https://www.hoohing.co.uk/

DawnW

MrsLurcherwalker said:

Yes we do have a car but don't have the necessary card to be able to use the cash and carry wholesalers, we had a neighbour back in Hampshire running his own business who authorised us to use the company card and it was how I used to run my stocks, I miss it very much being able to go and buy 12.5kilo sacks of sugar and 10 litre containers of vinegar in the pickling season was most useful.  I don't know if we'd qualify as a private household to have use of something that would be very, very useful?

Some wholesale businesses in this area have started to offer deliveries to private customers - the ones who normally supply to hospitality businesses would not be doing any trade at the moment otherwise. Likewise some local pubs have opened 'farm shops' that sell all kinds of things (even things like flour which supermarkets don't seem to have at the moment), as they can't be pubs at the moment. It might be worth checking fbook (or asking someone else to if you don't do social media) or looking at web sites of local facilities that you know of, to see what there is local to you. I would be very surprised if nobody is offering similar services wherever you are.

mrs_motivated

Nargleblast said:

On the positive side, some of the spirit of community and co-operation will remain, and our society in general will be nicer and kinder. Less materialistic too, I hope, although in some quarters people are likely to go on an initial binge-fest in terms of spending, having been deprived of the thrill of shopping for so long.  I think also the population will be less inclined to put up with nonsense from those in charge. Ultimately I am hoping for a shift towards a more altruistic society.

This is what I am hoping for Nargleblast.

Unusual prepping for me today, prepping for a partial return to work in the next few weeks.   So today I was tasked with sourcing hand sanitiser gel, gloves and masks for if we return to the office for the team who will be out and about in the community, visiting people’s homes. It has been decided that when restrictions are lifted we will each do 2 dates in the office and three days at home so we can maintain social distancing but can slowly open more services.   Currently we are all working from home will only essential visits for emergency situations, thankfully there hasn’t been that many and our community team are out and about distributing food parcels and shopping for the vulnerable.  It has saddened me to see just how expensive these items are and glad I was paying on the Company credit card and not out of my own pocket.

[Deleted User]

Freedom of speech? freedom of principles, freedom of thought and personal preferences but I don't know the person/persons in real life so I can't comment on whether it's a racist in attitude or not.

I don't give a hoot what race, colour, creed, preferences, or anything else people are, if they're nice people I'll like them even if they're purple but if they're not nice I won't.  It won't be for any other reason than that though and I think most of us preppers have that attitude from the posts I read.

mothernerd

There are many things in our own culture which have contributed to this crisis or have caused problems including a work culture which demands that people drag themselves into work even when it's apparent they are dying on their feet and in many cases are frightened to take time off in case they are sacked. The way public services, in particular the NHS have been cut time and again and the contempt which health service workers, teachers, firefighters have been held. The belief (supported by the insidious propaganda of programmes like Benefit Street) that those on benefits are all workshy, faking it or fraudsters and the normalisation of people in full time work being dependent on charity to feed their children. The widespread adoption of 'business practices' regardless of whether they are suitable for a particular industry or organisation. SM reliant on overnight deliveries to restock their shelves so that, despite the stories of people with trolleys piled high, the mere buying of one or two 'just in case' items by all shoppers caused the whole system to crack wide apart.

It wasn't 'the Chinese' who came up the excellent wheeze of feeding the brains of diseased sheep to cows - the poor cows had been happily eating grass for thousands of years, they didn't decide to become carnivorous overnight - so disease crosses species from sheep to cow and then from cows to humans. Someone had a waste product and decided to make it turn a profit just as stockpiled chemical weapons (ours as it happens) left over from WW2 were touted as ideal products to make the crops grow or kill pests that reduced yields. People just being born still have traces of chemicals that were banned many years ago.

Technology could have set us all free. We could have had enough (enough for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed) to live on, with machines doing all the grim monotonous tasks and have spent our time making one another's lives better. Making art, music or craft that gave others pleasure, doctors and teachers doing what they did with adequate resources and enough sharing the task to make the work a pleasure not  a never ending round of work work and endless paperwork. Those who wished to think and ponder and work on the problems facing society would have time and energy to do so, all of us working in harmony with our planet, our home.

Some of the ideas on offer at the last election were derided as 'communism' or 'pie in the sky' but they are only seen as such in this extreme version of capitalism being practiced here and in the USA. For most of the world education and healthcare for all, adequate public services, publicly owned transport networks are seen as the norm or standards to be aspired to. The push to get people back to work comes from the business leaders we are all supposed to emulate (it turns out that they didn't make all those billions by themselves - I recently read the maths on being a billionaire and it's roughly if you earned £500 a day and worked for a 1,000 years, you still wouldn't be a billionaire). Let's try to spend this time thinking and working towards the kind of society, the kind of world that we would wish for ourselves, for our children' for all the world's children, for those in need of our help, compassion and love.

euronorris

First sourcing gloves, I can recommend this site: https://www.justgloves.co.uk/

I ordered a box in medium for me, and a box in XL for DH, and then a burns plaster to make up the minimum order amount (£15). This was about 2 weeks ago, and it arrived in 2 days. My Mum placed a similar order early last week, and again it arrived quickly.

It has a good range of sizes, which I needed as DH has big hands and places like Boots don't stock larger than a large. But if you are sourcing for a team, then it should be great for  sizes, choice, and delivery. And you shouldn't have any issue meeting the minimum order value.

We are not ordering any takeaways at the moment, simply because we are concerned about the contamination risk, from the cook right through to the delivery driver. This applies to everything from Chinese to Fish and Chips. Although small, it's just another risk that isn't necessary, so we are sticking to our one delivery shop per week and that's it. 

Not ordering anything from China either, for the simple reason that it WOULD take soooo long to get here at the moment. And there is a chance it may not make it at all. And again, limiting things we order to necessity. 

When the risk is greatly reduced, then we can indulge again, but not before.

Onebrokelady

thriftwizard said:

It might be an interesting exercise to try to work out what those who pull the strings (and pay the piper) will be hoping for in the "New Normal"... this would be rather a good chance to slip some fairly fundamental alterations to our way of life in under the guise of following the science & doing what's best for the NHS. Or am I being unduly cynical?

Not cynical ....realistic 

Nargleblast

Good points, mothernerd.

What if this pandemic has changed the mindset of humanity, making people more appreciative of the basic, important things in life, i.e. health, secure home, decent food, family, friends, education? We have seen so many examples of people doing good things for others, is it possible this could continue once lockdown has ended?

I hope so. I doubt every member of the human race left alive will become nicer, but a quite a few might. That "quite a few" could just be enough to initiate the move to a better society, one where people matter more than possessions. 

-taff

I like your thinking mothernerd. It usually takes a big shock for an individual to realise what's important and what isn't and before this pandemic it was usually a serious health scare that did it. Maybe, hopefully this will occur to a lot more people now.

DawnW

Well said Mothernerd.