Fun fact: Overstock.com, your home for discounts on handsome-but-unnecessary ottomans, has a substantial stockpile of food and precious metals, just in case there’s some catastrophic financial collapse. You know—as one does.
Jonathan Johnson, Overstock’s chairman of the board, is currently running for governor of Utah, and he dropped this little fact recently while making the campaign rounds. The Salt Lake City Tribune reports:
Johnson told the United Precious Metals Association — a group that was behind legislation to make gold legal tender in the state — that the company keeps small button-sized gold and silver coins outside the banking system.
“We expect when there is a financial crisis, there will be a banking holiday,” Johnson, Overstock chairman of the board, told the group. “I don’t know if it will be two days or two weeks or two months. But we have $10 million in gold and silver in denominations small enough … that we can use it for payroll. We want to be able to keep our employees paid [and] safe and our site up and running.”
He added that they have three months of food for each employee and their spouse—although it’s freeze-dried, which brings us back to the old Walking Dead conundrum of whether surviving is the same thing as living. Once you decide your answer to that question, know that Overstock.com has an impressive array of emergency preparedness offerings. A bucket of 30 days of astronaut food can be yours for a mere $112.99!
Quartz notes:
Johnson is a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints, a political powerhouse in Utah. Although he did not say that religion plays any part in the stockpiling, storing food and supplies for unforeseen circumstances is also part of Mormon teachings. Believers are required to maintain a three-month and “long-term” supply of food and water and “financial reserves.”
And yet in all those zombie movies, nobody’s ever trying to get to Utah.
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Image via Shutterstock.
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