14 ms·
Danish supermarket chain is setting up "Emergency Stores"
- unethical_ban 1y agoThree days seems low, but any resilience is better than no resilience.
- larholm 1y agoThese stores are not supposed to prepare you for three days of resilience in advance. They are meant to be available as reliable and functioning stores throughout a crisis period. Your go-to destination for purchasing vital goods during the crisis.
- fragmede 1y agoIt's the local supermarket. How many days in advance am I supposed to have food for? (I have prepper quantities of food and don't know what's normal. three days seems pretty normal to me.)
- hadlock 1y agoA big chunk of society has realistically 2-3 days of groceries in their house, plus maybe a 5-year-old bag of rice or pasta and can of string beans buried way in the back. If you have a 1-6 year old you're probably buying 1-3 gallons of milk per week, and need to get more tomorrow.
- downrightmike 1y agoAfter covid, we keep a stock of extra dry goods on hand. If you need that much milk, it can just be frozen when found on sale. As long as it completely defrosts, you don't get any ice
- ars 1y agoYou can also get shelf stable, canned, or powdered milk. That way you have it even with a power outage.
- freedomben 1y agoA Camp Chef or Turkey fryer is also a great investment for this purpose as they are very useful on their own, and double as a gas-powered source for cooking in an emergency. They can also boil large pots of water quickly should you need
- bigiain 1y agoAs much as I detest organised religion, the Mormons have a pretty good take on this. They strive to have a six month supply of food/water/cash on hand at all times.
- throwaway31131 1y agoI get it. But on the other hand, if you in a situation that requires a six month food supply, because there is no resupply available and you can’t relocate, you have bigger problems. Like the mob of hungry people outside your house.
- toast0 1y agoIf you have a six month food supply, and survivable disasters really only need a week or two tops, you will have no reservations helping out your neighbors, which helps you be a positive influence on your community in time of need. If you've only got two days supply, you may not be so generous.
- throwaway31131 1y agoThat’s a good point I hadn’t considered.
- freedomben 1y agoExactly. There are surely some people that will be stingy (as Mormons are humans after all) but there's a huge emphasis on being able to help out the neighbors and the unprepared in a bad situation. Depending on the area too, they even have rough distribution/response plans in place so they aren't starting from scratch during an emergency. You'll occassionaly see comments like "I'm stocked up so my family is fine while all the city people are eating each other" but (anecdatally having lived in heavily Mormom areas most of my life) the vast majority do not feel that way. Even some of the people who I've heard said that, I'd bet a huge amount they would not sit by and watch another human starve
- 1y ago
- abdullahkhalids 1y agoThis is why it's important to build a diet with grains and beans. They are cheap and last for months/years at home if stored properly. So you can easily have enough stored at home to eat for at least a few weeks.
- eddythompson80 1y agoWell, there is always the question of who’s gonna pay for that resiliency. We see it all the time in software deployment. After each extended outage of a major network or cloud/service provider, there is always a flurry of sudden interest in disaster recovery, multi-zonal deployments, failover solutions, and redundancy up and down the chain of everything. 6 months or a year later, people and organizations get sick of paying for that. They either nerf it, making it just a useless checkbox or just abandon it completely because “if us-east-2 is down, then everything is down. Who cares”. A couple of years pass, then another incident happens, rinse and repeat.
- mopsi 1y agoThree days is realistic timeframe for restoring power and rudimentary network connectivity.
- arlort 1y agoThey're realistically not preparing for a zombie apocalypse If power goes out really bad, there's some kind of major weather event in some part of the country etc 3 days is a reasonable time frame for emergency measures to be put in place
- ngcc_hk 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- metalman 1y ago[flagged]
- 0xfaded 1y agoThe Danish word for hoarding is "hamstering". Perhaps the most adorable thing about the language. (P.S. the pronunciation of hygge is anything but hyggelig)
- decimalenough 1y agoI always wondered why, until I actually got a hamster. Turns out that when presented with a large amount of food, they "hamster" it by stuffing their massive cheeks until they're bulging, then scurry off to consume in peace. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-3x7dLXoAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-3x7dLXoAk
- daniel_iversen 1y agoHah yeah Denmark is very boring compared to many other countries :) ... and not meant as a warrantless dig against a large country with a high ratio of pistols-per-capita, but I did research it yesterday and from what I can tell America hasn't changed the 10 rights in their Bill Of Rights ever, whereas Denmark has made major revisions to its entire constitution multiple times.
- darknavi 1y agoI'd add that some U.S. states are actively attempting to make it harder/impossible to amend their state's constitution! https://missouriindependent.com/2025/09/08/missouri-house-advances-bill-to-make-it-harder-for-voters-to-amend-state-constitution/ https://missouriindependent.com/2025/09/08/missouri-house-ad...
- jfengel 1y agoWe change our Bill of Rights all the time. We just do it by "reinterpreting" it, i.e. applying the prejudices of the last 4 or 5 Presidents. Conveniently, none of it actually means anything at all, so it is routinely reinterpreted to mean exactly the opposite of what it might appear to mean. That's not quite true. You still can't quarter soldiers in somebody's house. We Americans have a firm fixed belief in the Third Amendment.
- tokai 1y agoFeels a bit like cheeky marketing from Salling Group, when its just a concept years away from being rolled out. I don't see them running stores with sub optimal stock and other complexities, just for the good of their hearts. Or maybe they just looked at the odds and concluded that likelihood of a lockdown-like event is enough to make it a sound investment.
- ksec 1y ago>The idea is that no one should be more than 50 km from such a store and it should prevent hoarding/panic buying as people will know basic food will be available in an emergency. I dont think that is how it works? That is assuming people wont flock out to buy everything in the emergency store. And do people visit it every day or are these "Emergency Stores". After all they need to replenish stock. Or are these simply some form of marketing play? Off-Topic: Its been while since I last visited a The Mastodon site and it seems a lot faster than before.
- eru 1y ago> That is assuming people wont flock out to buy everything in the emergency store. Well, you could make everything really expensive in these emergency stores during an emergency.
- chrisphilip 1y agoIsn’t this just price gouging which is illegal in much of the US at least, I don’t know about internationally.
- eru 1y agoI think it's fine, if it's always expensive, not just in an emergency. (Yes, the US has silly laws there, too.)
- dcow 1y agoI think there’s a subtle difference between charging everyone $100 per umbrella in a rain storm vs charging $100 for your last few umbrellas. Former is price gouging; latter is just economics.
- eru 1y agoAlas, I don't think the law sees it that way.
- 1y ago
- nmstoker 1y agoWithout power they could use backup sources but without telecoms isn't payment going to be difficult to impossible? (except those who had sufficient cash before the emergency)
- extraduder_ire 1y agoYou can do offline verification of payment cards, there's just higher fees and lower limits on payments. This is a common way people get their current accounts into debt without authorising an overdraught.
- macintux 1y agoWhen I was a kid, I remember the cashier at a department store checking a book for my mother’s credit card number. I misunderstood the nature of the book, assuming it was a list of valid card numbers. It was, of course, the opposite, so when I said to my mom “I hope they find your number in there” she replied “I hope they don’t!”
- aDyslecticCrow 1y agoIt's used by alot of vending machines or public transport. The bus can be off-grid while still allowing a ticket purchase. Im not that familiar with the protocol, but i could see there being a special clause to allow larger off-grid payments in emergency situations.
- 14 1y agoWell I assume if they set it up in mind that they would be operating in an emergency they could have something like Starlink and connect to payment processors.
- Maxious 1y agoEMV cards can do offline auth
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoDoes this just mean bags of rice/beans? 10kg of rice will store quite a while and provide many days of food.
- jopsen 1y agoThe sensible thing would be to store more of existing non-persishables and then cycle through to other stores. 10kg bags of rice is not a common supermarket item in Denmark.
- ambicapter 1y agoWait, so we're now approaching risk levels high enough that's its economically feasible for businesses to prepare for situations where their stores lose power, telecom, and resupply? Are we already preparing for land war across western Europe?
- quantummagic 1y agoThe economic collapse of the west. The great reset is coming...
- neets 1y agoIf this is the sentiment on the Silicon Valley Bulletin Board that is Hacker News it may be time to take this stuff seriously
- malfist 1y agoSilicon valley is hardly an oracle of all things to come
- et-al 1y agoThis is a perennial topic: - 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-val... - 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep... It’s tougher to quantify and building a connected community than just profiting off users, though.
- mh- 1y ago> Silicon Valley Bulletin Board The participating commenter base on this site has been much wider than could be described that way for many years.
- lovich 1y ago
- londons_explore 1y agoWhat pays for this? If an emergency store costs 10% more to run, and emergencies are only 1 day in 10,000, then prices during emergencies would need to be 1000x normal for it to make business sense. Unfortunately anti-price-gouging laws wouldn't allow that, nor would you manage to keep law and order in the shop when telling customers that a bottle of water is gonna cost them 2000 dollars/euros.
- glxxyz 1y agoIt sounds like the company is doing it as a community service. It doesn't make 'business sense' except perhaps by improving the company's image. Companies also donate to charities etc. “This is our core task and a responsibility we take on, and we also believe that it is timely […] that we – like other countries – prepare for possible crisis situations, which a good and constructive dialogue with the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness has also confirmed. We hope that this will not be necessary, but should it happen, our customers can count on us.” https://www.esmmagazine.com/retail/salling-group-advances-work-on-emergency-stores-296026 https://www.esmmagazine.com/retail/salling-group-advances-wo...
- abdullahkhalids 1y agoIt's important to note that the Salling Group is privately owned with only a few owners [1]. It's easier for such companies to do such things than a publicly owned one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salling_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salling_Group
- glxxyz 1y agoPublic companies do this sort of thing too, or at least they used to. It's typically grouped under 'Corporate Social Responsibility'. They aren't doing it out of pure altruism: From https://benevity.com/resources/corporate-social-responsibility-benefits https://benevity.com/resources/corporate-social-responsibili... "CSR increases customer retention and loyalty: Research shows that 87% of Americans are more likely to buy a product from a company that they can align their values with, and over half of all consumers are willing to pay extra for a product if they’re buying from a company with a sturdy CSR strategy."
- 0xWTF 1y agoIn case you haven't contemplated this logistics challenge before: the key is you need to stock shelf-stable products in these stores and at some point in their shelf life, transfer them out to other stores for actual consumption and back fill the emergency stores with fresh lots of new shelf stable products. You're just buying more shelf-stable supply once and then managing the transit through the supply chain with speed bump before the last mile.
- tshaddox 1y agoIs that so? I presumed they would always be open as normal stores, but prepared to stay open as “emergency stores” when necessary.
- paranoidrobot 1y agoThey are normal stores. The OP is talking about how they handle keeping fresh stock of products with lower sales volume. (Or at least, that's the way I'm reading it)
- wallopinski 1y ago[dead]
- throwawayqqq11 1y ago> stock shelf-stable products in these stores and at some point in their shelf life, transfer them out to other stores for actual consumption Back in my days in retail, we were ordered to put resupply as FILO into the shelfs. It makes sense to sell the oldest products first. So why the transfer shuffle?
- zrobotics 1y agoIt's still FILO, the shuffle is needed for multiple locations. The emergency store keeps (for example) 5x the stock of canned beans, and feeds an area with 4 regular stores. They have 5x more stock then they could regularly sell, so if stock wasn't transferred then the canned beans would expire before they were sold. They need to transfer their surplus inventory to the 4 regular stores they feed before that stock ages, since in regular use they won't sell them in time. Since I've had to deal with a similar issue professionally, maybe think of a retailer with 5 distribution warehouses and 50 stores. Normally you want to pick from the closest distribution warehouse to minimize transport costs. However, for food items that expire sometimes it might make sense to pick from the furthest warehouse if their stock is getting older, you need to optimize both for transport costs and the cost of having to throw food away. It's beyond a HN comment, and I'd have to review what isn't NDA, but the optimization math for such a scenario gets both really complicated and really interesting. Hope this clarifies why they would be moving stick though.
- snitzr 1y agoI like anything that adds resilience to a system.
- patrickhogan1 1y agoGood idea. Smart that they can withstand 72-hour power issues. 3 days still seems short, but much better than current. I'm with the mormons on this issue, who emphasize preparedness for emergencies. Typically storing up to a year of non-perishable food.
- XorNot 1y ago3 days to allow emergency response to arrive is a lot of buffer, when otherwise after 2 days you have to start moving to find water and plan to find food. Combined with things in people's houses that likely gets you to about a week before anyone is going without.
- freedomben 1y agoMormons also (are encouraged to) store water and other basic necessities like toilet paper. It's not unusual to see a couple 55-gallon drums of water in a basement or garage of a Mormon house. They've also heavily adopted the filtering straws/pumps for areas where there are natural sources of water
- pogue 1y agoIt's a very good idea. I wish we had good ideas in the United States.
- labrador 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hattmall 1y agoIt's a private grocer, it's not like the government is doing it. So anyone could set this up. It also doesn't even sound like that great of an idea. Is each store going to have enough to serve everyone in the 50km region for 3 days?
- dmix 1y agoThe better question is will it seriously increase the number of people’s access to goods during an emergency. Or is it just an extra stop for the panic buyers buying up everything in bulk on the way back home on the first day or two before the rest of the people start taking it seriously. IRL market demands are massive for a western country so it’d require a lot more than a single chain of grocers staying open late. Or more accurately a huge devastating emergency to kill off essential industry like food production/distribution.
- ars 1y agoThe US has more good ideas than any other country. Don't be pessimistic, look at how things are actually going and you'll see how the US has more startups, R&D, and new products than any other county. Also: This might be a good idea for them, but it's not a good idea for the US, the US is not exposed to a level of risk that makes this worth it.
- elzbardico 1y agoItem #388293 of things that would never happen in America. During the Cold War, even the Soviet Union had better missile defense and civil defense infrastructure than the US.
- chiph 1y agoBy treaty, both sides were limited in missile defense. The Soviets placed theirs around Moscow (to hell with the krest'yanin), while the US placed them around larger cities (also likely targets but this diffused the effectiveness of the system). Civil Defense was taken seriously in the US for a while (I was trained as a radiological monitor in high school) but fatalism and optimism took over. Countries like Switzerland made changes to their national building code requiring all homes and larger buildings to have shelters. IMO the US should have standardized shelter plans as an optional part of our building code, so if someone wants one, there's a proven design available. With regard to Denmark, look to the Mormon Church. They have a mandate (not always followed!) to keep a years supply of food in the house. So the church has distribution warehouses and publishes information about long-term storage. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/topics/food-storage/longer-term-food-supply?lang=eng https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/topics/food-storage/long...
- elzbardico 1y agoThanks for your informative comment. For real.
- freedomben 1y agoOn a nationwide scale, yeah probably not, but nor do I think it should be done at the federal level. You could get economies of scale on purchasing and storage, but I suspect there would be more inefficiencies emergent from such a large scale thing than would be worth it. Each geographic area has very different needs, very different population makeups, and more, so somebody local is much better equipped to evaluate and plan. Even just "how much water to store" varies immensely. If you're on a water shed in an area with frequent rainfall, it would be wasteful to store a ton of water, but if you're in a desert water storage is one of the most important things. But even just communication setups like ham radio and designated response personnel is something that needs to be worked out locally. I've been involved in several different cities emergency preparedness plans though, and there is actually a lot more happening in the US than most people think or know. It rarely if ever makes the news, but it happens.
- petermcneeley 1y agoThis is quite a fun app to play with: This link has some presets https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=55.6753132&lng=12.5697339&hob_psi=5&hob_ft=47553&ff=52&psi=20,5,1&zm=8 https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=55.675313...
- ionwake 1y agoNot sure if this is of interest but I was living in Denmark during the "announcement" that the country was closing flights as COVID was now being taken seriously. Being somewhat of a "cautious" prepper mentality, though never having really done any prepping, I thought I would walk to the supermarket at night in a suburb of Copenahgen to get some extra tuna just in case. Mind you this was about an hour after the announcement say 8pm. There was a queue of about 30 meters out of the supermarket of danish citizens, scared and ( possibly for the first time ever thought as a visitor I couldnt know for sure - the queue had ever been so long. As I walked away I could see through the window, that they were limiting the amount of people going into the store to a handful at a time. And, very suprisingly I saw a normal Dane running round the aisle grabbing the milk cartons so quickly he knocked some onto the floor before continuing to run off down the aisle. Very movie like so to speak. Not something I ever saw in the UK during the same announcement a month earlier. Bear in mind this was also at night! A night food panic. Well, the good news, is ( other than this one incident that lasted an hour or so), the Danes IMO handled the whole COVID thing with a stable level headed attitude, that night was the only mild panic I witnessed. Months later they had a very honed and IMO fair, calm approach to testing and although teachers were forced to "take the vaccine" or "get into trouble" ( a teacher was expected to show they had taken it or a test or they simply coudln't be in school, thought the punishment was never explained), they were also the only country I noticed where if you were not vaccinated yet , you could still go to cafes as long as you had a "free" test in one of the many marquees around the city. ( To compare, in the UK for about half a year ALL cafes were closed, and it was mandatory to wear masks in public - not so in Denmark). One old lady started shouting at me whilst I drank coffee ( below my mask), on a train in the UK. When I asked her to calm down and stop shouting, that masks were not even worn in Denmark, she actually got extremely confused. (Just a memory.) I just thought this was of interest. Clearly they are still trying to learn lessons. Good stuff. EDIT> Sorry and my one funnny memory ( Im not complaining honest). Was a time in Denmark when it was (a) Cafe was open (b) You could go to cafe if you had been tested (c) You were given a literal FLAG that you would put on your table to warn other poeple you had ben tested but NOT vaccinated. A little white flag!!! Only once, I think that was at it worst, and about a month later I never saw the little flag again. Ah good times though.
- 1y ago
- chvid 1y agoOne of our biggest practical vulnerabilities is that our payment and electronic id infrastructure (nets, dankort, mitid) has been sold off to a private company (Mastercard) even though it was at one point a government owned and developed setup.
- jamesblonde 1y agoIn Sweden, we have Swish, thank God. We don't have Greenland either, so people aren't as worried about 'exogenous shocks'.
- vodou 1y agoSwish is great, but it is sensitive infrastructure. It has already been down multiple times due to DDoS attacks (together with BankId). Don't let Swish completely replace a stash of cash at home.
- jamesblonde 1y agoIt's another knife in the drawer.
- benrutter 1y agoI've got bad news for you on that front: https://www.explorsweden.com/sweden-destinations/sweden-a-cashless-society-embracing-the-future-of-money/ https://www.explorsweden.com/sweden-destinations/sweden-a-ca... (tldr Sweden is pretty cashless and a lot of shops don't accept cash)
- vasco 1y agoIt's funny that these guys found a way to exploit the war to get free marketing from probably a warehouse expansion / warehouse-store hybrid they'd do anyway, and people think they are some prescient preppers. If war starts, 3 days supplies helps with effectively nothing and people will go to supermarkets to hoard anyway.
- austin-cheney 1y agoThere is a regional chain where I live in Texas, HEB, that has a similar solution they solve via emergency distribution schedule. They found that environmental disasters can be profitable to operate at a loss and support the community because they are able to come back online faster than the competition and minimize disruption to regular operations.
- ProllyInfamous 1y agoI'm a fifth-generation ex-Texan — the only thing I miss is HEB.
- jeffrallen 1y agoHaving a government operated emergency stock and a military with the capacity to move it is how Switzerland does it. And we stock coffee too, not just grain. :) https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/mandatory-reserves_why-switzerland-stockpiles-for-possible-emergencies/44917424 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/mandatory-reserves_why...
- 4ggr0 1y agothey (the gov) also provide a calculator which shows you how much stuff you need for your household for a given amount of days :) https://www.notvorratsrechner.bwl.admin.ch/en https://www.notvorratsrechner.bwl.admin.ch/en
- andyjohnson0 1y agoIts not clear to me whether this is stores as in "shops" where you can go to buy things, or as in "storage" ie distribution hubs. Anyone know?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- emil-lp 1y ago> beredskabsbutikker be-red-skab-s-butikk-er Prepper store (as in grocery store). Butik, from French boutique. Beredskab, From German Bereitschaft.
- olau 1y agoPrepper store is potentially misleading, it's shops that are prepared to respond to a crisis for those that didn't prep.
- sneak 1y agoHow are people going to pay for things? With no power or network, card payments stop working, and so do ATMs.
- helsinkiandrew 1y agoThis is eerily similar to Finlands scheme: https://www.azernews.az/region/239068.html https://www.azernews.az/region/239068.html Which is backed up by stock piles of essential goods: https://www.huoltovarmuuskeskus.fi/en/organisation/the-national-emergency-supply-agency https://www.huoltovarmuuskeskus.fi/en/organisation/the-natio... The 72Hour emergency preparedness sites suggest every household have some emergency cash: https://72tuntia.fi/en/ https://72tuntia.fi/en/
- ThinkBeat 1y agoIf they mostly cover food and other products specifically aimed at preppers / a time of crisis. How can these store be profitable when there isn't a crisis? Or will they be closed when there isn't a crisis?