Moving Money if Banking System faces a crisis

p00hsticks

d63 said:

busy!!! i expect they are!!! my problem is of right now, there is not one single home delivery slot available in my area at either sainsburys, tesco, ocado, waitrose, morrisons, or asda. (co-op don't deliver around here). hopefully something will turn up in the days to come, but i am finding it increasingly difficult to stay calm about all this as even before this covid started i was housebound and relied entirely on home deliveries. time to start thinking of alternatives i guess. but never mind! plenty of people far worse off than me. 

As a potential alternative I suggest you see if there is a mutual aid group local to you - either check your local council website and/or look here https://covidmutualaid.org/

Obviously it varies from area to area, but my local one has lists of local butchers, greengrocers, convenience stores and wholesales who will deliver, links to other support organisations and individuals either offering or requesting help.

d63

Malthusian said:

Have you contacted the supermarkets to let them know you are a vulnerable customer? (I realise that even for those who are registered, delivery slots are in short supply.)

far easier said than done alas!! in the early days (like only last week, but seems more like a year now!) sainsburys posted a number to contact about getting on their vulnerable list, but the line was continually busy and i never managed to speak to a real person. then out of the blue a email said i was eligible for one delivery a week -- if you can find a free slot that is! as for the other supermarkets i've had no success so far since (happily) i am not sufficiently unwell to be put on the extremely vulnerable government list, so like the hundreds of thousands of others in a similar pickle, it is pretty much pot luck whether one can find a slot anywhere.
 in retrospect it's a pity they never asked your age when first registering as a customer, but then before all this started i might have felt a little aggrieved about them wanting such personal information.
oh well. we are where we are, and no doubt things will get a lot worse before it gets better. i dare say it will be ration cards and food parcels from the red-cross before we are through!!

d63

p00hsticks said:

d63 said:

busy!!! i expect they are!!! my problem is of right now, there is not one single home delivery slot available in my area at either sainsburys, tesco, ocado, waitrose, morrisons, or asda. (co-op don't deliver around here). hopefully something will turn up in the days to come, but i am finding it increasingly difficult to stay calm about all this as even before this covid started i was housebound and relied entirely on home deliveries. time to start thinking of alternatives i guess. but never mind! plenty of people far worse off than me. 

As a potential alternative I suggest you see if there is a mutual aid group local to you - either check your local council website and/or look here https://covidmutualaid.org/

Obviously it varies from area to area, but my local one has lists of local butchers, greengrocers, convenience stores and wholesales who will deliver, links to other support organisations and individuals either offering or requesting help.

thank you for the suggestions. it is most encouraging to see how many of these mutual-aid type groups are springing up all over the place, full of kind people prepared to help out others. 

Eco_Miser

Malthusian said:

d63 said:

more worrying, perhaps, what if the internet goes down for a considerable period of time?

The Internet can't go down unless every single computer plugged into an Ethernet port (or Wi-fi) explodes. Contrary to what you may have seen on the documentary The IT Crowd, the Internet is not a single entity that can be turned on and off. It is every single computer that has the hardware to connect to every single other computer via shared protocols (which the vast majority of them). It's not a big truck, it's a series of tubes.

The scenario you actually want to consider is something like the Lloyds online banking shutdown.

While the whole internet can't go down, the relevant part can, particularly the clever bits that join all those tubes together - the Internet Exchange points, like LINX. If that goes, rerouting may be possible, if several go, the Internet, effectively, for the people using those exchanges, goes.