That portion of America’s population that preps for disaster often in the past has been limited to handsful of people with electric generators in their garage and basements full of dry and canned foods stacked on shelves.
In other words, a relatively small number.
But it’s growing, and the younger populations are leading the way.
That’s according to a survey by Finder.com that was profiled in Fox News.
The results reveal that in 2019, only 20% of Americans reported making a disaster-related purchase over the previous year. The most recent year found 29% doing that, with 39% of Millennials and 40% of Gen Zers “reported spending money on disaster prepping in the last 12 months.”
Those numbers had spiked during COVID, when 45% confirmed such purchases, and among Millennials it was 58% and among Gen Zers it was 59%.
While the later numbers were down, Fox explained, “Younger Americans appear to be the ones preparing the most for a disaster scenario ahead of 2024, with everything from global pandemics to the upcoming presidential election on their minds.”
“In my work, I see young people worried about a repeat of a COVID-type event and the types of disruption in can bring to daily life,” explained Chad Huddleston, of Southern Illinois University, in a visit with Fox News Digital.
And Drew Miller, chief of Fortitude Collapse Preparedness, added, “Our people have known for a long time that when there’s an electric grid failure or a real pandemic… that people won’t go to work, there won’t be food, and they’ll starve if you don’t have preparations.”
Patrick McCall, of McCall Risk Group, explained to Fox, “The number of sites I think that were selling these [emergency preparedness] things or the number of places that were offering this type of stuff on the Internet was very scarce [in 2017]. Obviously, then we got into COVID, which created its own dilemmas and own kind of prepping in a different bit of craziness, as I would call it.”
Several experts suggested concerns over the 2024 presidential election could be a motivating factor.
Miller cited concerns over a “possible civil war” following the election. Democrats, in fact, repeatedly have claimed that democracy will be dead if President Donald Trump is victorious, despite the fact the policies and actions of Democrat candidate Joe Biden, the incumbent, have repeatedly undermined democracy through his agenda to censor ordinary Americans, and impose punishment for thought crimes.
It’s also partly because national and international politics are “more chaotic,” according to Brekke Wagoner, who runs the Sustainable Prepping social media channel.
“I think for the first time, a lot of Millennials and Gen Zers are realizing how fragile our systems are. We’ve grown up in a time in which technology has meant we’ve had grocery stores that were always stocked and you can get anything from Amazon in 24 hours. Then all of a sudden the pandemic and some uncertainties in our national and international politics has made us rethink how all of these systems are not as stable as we assumed,” Wagoner said
