Been marinating in my brain...
Bags of gasoline, toilet paper, water bottles, land, houses, gold, bitcoin, dogecoin, baseball cards, pokemon toys, amiibos, sneakers, you name it.
The media will frame this as the irresponsible and ignorant hoarding of your fellow man, the unending greed of American citizens; but I also have to think of this speaks to, oft unexamined in mainstream news outlets, the desperation of regular folks. They buy bags of gasoline not just for themselves but on the off chance they make it big. They hoard toilet paper on the off chance they can sell in excess. Everything is a hustle because when you are starving, are broke, got bills up to your neck, you have to hustle.
Or am I wrong? Is it a fundamentally American thing to reach certain stratas of society and just want to greedily turn every object into a cash-cow, a golden goose egg? Once you reach an extra 30k of income, and you don't want to waste it on your dumb stupid family, you decide to gamble with it out of sheer boredom?
Who are these people really?
You're right, I have watched more doomsday preppers than I care to admit and they are probably all chuds. I don't remember even seeing a garden or greenhouse in an episode, it fits into Discovery/History channel's politics though.
I also think they forced some of the preppers change their reason for prepping (electronic grid going down, financial crash, etc), both to be different from the other episodes and probably to not let them say that Jews or minorities will cause a collapse.