It is starting to look a lot like 2008. Extremely long lines are forming at food banks all over the country, job losses and layoffs are starting to spike, countless small businesses are right on the brink of going under, a housing crash that could be even worse than what we witnessed in 2008 has begun, and large numbers of Americans are actually moving into sheds in a desperate attempt to save money. This new economic downturn is still only in the very early stages, and yet the economic suffering that we are already seeing all over the country is truly frightening. If people are struggling this much now, what will conditions be like six months down the road?
If you find yourself cutting back spending on groceries and gasoline these days, you are definitely not alone.
According to a Suffolk University/USA TODAY survey that was just released, about half the nation is in the same boat…
According to the survey, 45.3 percent of Americans have had to cut back their spending on groceries, and 59.4 percent said they are now going out to eat less often as the result of inflation.
Another 48 percent said they are driving less, and 45.4 percent said they are postponing or canceling vacations/travel plans due to rising costs.
Inflation is absolutely eviscerating our standard of living, and millions upon millions of Americans are deeply hurting right now.
And when people are deeply hurting, they often become quite desperate.
There has been a very alarming rise in shoplifting all over the United States, and food and other essentials have become prime targets.
In New York City, things have gotten so bad that one store has actually decided to start “locking up cases of Spam”…
With robberies up nearly 40 percent in New York City, it’s perhaps no surprise that a local pharmacy has taken the extreme steps of locking up cases of Spam.
Twitter user Willy Staley noticed the tins of $3.99 processed meat sealed in a theft-proof plastic container at the Duane Reade inside the Port Authority bus depot in Midtown Manhattan – known as one of New York’s grimiest areas.
Staley also found a $3.49 tin of Celebrity ham, which retails for a similar price, protected with the same measure.
You can see a photo of spam in a “theft-proof plastic container” right here.
I have a couple of reactions to this. First of all, who in the world would pay $3.99 for a can of Spam? It is absolutely disgusting and I wouldn’t eat it under any circumstances even if someone gave it to me for free.
Secondly, why would anyone ever steal a can of Spam when they are so many other options that are actually edible? I just don’t understand.
Of course it isn’t just Spam that is being locked up these days. According to CNN, at this point a lot of retailers have been transformed into “fortresses” due to rapidly rising theft…
These days, it feels like many stores are fortresses.
Most of the products on the drug store shelf are behind lock and key, even everyday items such as deodorant, toothpaste, candy, dish detergent, soap and aluminum foil. Manufacturers that supply lock cases and devices to chain stores have seen their businesses boom.
The reason why this is happening on such a widespread basis is because “organized retail crime” has become a really big thing here in the United States…
Walgreens and Rite Aid have said that the problem of organized retail crime — rings of criminals that steal products from stores and then often resell them on online marketplaces — is causing them to lock more products up and close some stores.
If this is taking place while the U.S. economy is still at least somewhat relatively stable, what will it be like once we officially plunge into a full-blown economic depression?
Another very troubling sign is the massive lines that we are starting to see at food banks all over the country.
According to Zero Hedge, food banks from coast to coast are reporting “record high demand and record low supply”…
In the past month there has been a steady stream of reports from pantries across the US stating that they are now hitting record high demand and record low supply. From New York to Wisconsin to Ohio to Missouri to Florida to Arkansas to California and beyond, pantries are running out. On top of that, it’s the middle of summer – The busiest time for food banks and the Salvation Army is during the winter holidays.
The majority of pantries indicate that they are most in need of cash donations and that these have started to fade out. When it comes to necessities, most people will not or cannot reduce the frequency of their purchases. Food, gas, housing, utilities, etc. are fixed income costs, and when these costs rise workers must cut costs elsewhere. Charities are usually the first to see the chopping block.
The level of demand at our food banks is only going to increase during the months ahead. At some point there simply will not be enough food for everyone.
I really hope that you are getting prepared for the very difficult times that are coming, because there will be a limit to what charitable organizations are able to do for you.
Some Americans are attempting to radically reduce their expenses by literally moving into a shed.
One woman in Texas that was interviewed by Newsweek really regretted spending all of her money on a shed because the living conditions turned out to not be pleasant at all…
A woman’s account of her life in a $2,000 shed during the Texas heatwave has sparked an anguished debate about affordable housing.
Elizabeth Rishforth, posting on TikTok under the username @a_nobody_goodbye, shared a video of herself red-faced and sweating on June 23. She was living in a shed without electricity or running water in Houston, Texas, she said.
“Me and my boyfriend [used] all the savings we had to get the shed,” Rishforth told Newsweek.
But others have found “shed life” to be quite nice.
A mother of four named Jessica Taylor is actually loving “shed life” even though her family uses a “composting bathroom”…
“One of the things people find really weird about us living in a shed is that we use a composting bathroom rather than a traditional toilet,” Taylor, 30, who now resides in a lofted shed in western Tennessee, told The Post.
“It’s a bucket system,” the former bartender-turned-home-schooler (or shed-schooler) explained of her hut’s outhouse. “And [when] you [urinate or defecate], you cover it with wood chips each time. After two days, whether the bucket is full or not, we dump [the waste] into a composting bin in the woods, and then after a couple of years, [the waste] turns into soil for ornamental plants.“
In recent months, housing has become the most unaffordable that it has ever been in the United States, and so “shed life” has absolutely exploded in popularity.
In fact, the “#ShedLife” hashtag has now been shared on TikTok more than 22 million times…
On TikTok, shed dwellers have stamped videos of their hovels-turned-homes with the hashtag #ShedLife over 22.2 million times.
“More and more people are breaking free from the mindset that you have to have the big expensive, fancy house to feel like they’re making it,” said Taylor of the allure of shed life. “There’s value in living modestly. We’re able to spend more time together gardening and enjoying nature rather than working to afford lavish accommodations.”
What about you?
Would you like to live in a shed?
As the economy continues to deteriorate, more and more Americans will be forced to choose “alternative lifestyles” in the months ahead.
But of course the elite are going to continue to insist that everything is just fine. If you can believe it, the definition of “recession” on Wikipedia was just changed to reflect the narrative of the Biden administration, and it has been locked to prevent any additional editing.
Do they actually believe that such heavy-handed measures will be effective?
The truth is that most Americans know that we are in a recession, and many have pointed out that even Bill Clinton has publicly acknowledged that a recession happens when GDP is negative for two quarters in a row.
But as I noted earlier, what we have been through so far is just the tip of the iceberg.
This economic downturn is going to get a lot worse, and that means that millions upon millions of Americans will soon become even more desperate.
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Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
$120 for $70 worth of food. Two weeks ago it was $110
Thank a democrat.