Home safe sales continue to skyrocket

This is an interesting article I did an ATS search on before bringing to the table. Curiously, while I did not find this particular article on ATS, I did find a couple of occurrences of essentially an identical article from the past 9 months or so. Seems like the trend is showing no sign of letting up.
Today's Article

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Amid the market turmoil, sales of security safes and vaults have spiked. While some shoppers sought to protect whatever valuables they had left, others needed a place to stash their newly-acquired safe haven assets such as gold and cash.

Port Charlotte, Fla.-based Value Safes said it sold an average of $13,000 in safes a day in the past week, more than tripling its daily average of $3,500 from the previous week. On Amazon.com (AMZN, Fortune 500), SentrySafe's $170 1.2-cubic foot combination safe was among the site's biggest "movers and shakers" Friday, with sales rising 44% over the past 24 hours.

Two previous mentions on ATS of this same trend:
December 2010
May, 2011

From the December 2010 article:

SAFE sales are soaring as more and more worried bank customers stash their cash at home.

AIB said last month that the amount of money on deposit at the bank has fallen by €13bn since the start of the year -- although it blamed most of the reduction on withdrawals by companies and financial institutions.

This is from IRELAND. By April of 2011, Ireland had been downgraded to junk status.

The second article was from the USA, coincidentally, the gap between the report of safe sales surging in Ireland and their huge downgrade is pretty close to the gap between the initial report of safe sales surging in the US and our first ever downgrade by S&P. Could this new report from today of yet further accelerated home safe sales be an ill omen that the wealthy have been informed that banks are not a wise place to store valuables? Could the US be preparing for an even greater downgrade expected around December of this year and home safe sales act as an odd little predictive tool?

Likely I'm just reading too much into this and, to be honest, 3 news articles over a 9 month period is not enough information to form a trendline from... but high volume home safe sales aren't exactly the only current indicator that we have a massive economic crisis on our collective hands.

Just a couple of notes for anyone who is planning on getting a safe, or who has one:

1. If it isn't bolted to your floor, prefferably cement, it's not safe to keep anything in.

2. It's cheaper to go to higher-end dicount stores, like Tuesday Morning, Marshall's, et. al. to check to see if they have safes.

Being somewhat of a "doomer" when it comes to economic and social collape, this is interesting info OP.

Personally I feel keeping fiat currency (paper money or coins) is pretty pointless if the banking system goes belly up. You are better off keeping tradable goods. Cartons of cigarettes - bags of seeds - tins of bacon. Hell, pretty much anything apart from green paper.

Those safes are generally very, very easy to break open.. and as another poster above me said, if it's not actually bolted to the floor in some difficult to remove way ...... they (burglar?) will just pick it up and walk off with it. If they even need to. A competent theif would be able to break those locks. Also aside form bolting it down, it should be concealed.. to many people put them on shelves in closets, on the floor in the office, or a bench in the garage.

Personally (please don't emulate me or take this as advice) I'd prefer to store valuable in a shabby box filled with textbooks and old clothes or rags, or in a dirty old shoe box. If someone broke into my home I assume they'd take my TV, computer etc etc etc .. and if I had a crappy little safe.. I assume they'd take that to. So why paint a big red arrow saying "steal my valuable crap please". I'd rather the theif work for it! Then again, I'd never be stupid enough to store cash and gold coins in my house anyways.......

reply to post by Rockpuck



WHen my grandmother passed away my parents & my aunt found an open, but full box of Depends adult diapers in her bedroom closet. My mom was surprised because my Gram wasn't, to the best of her knowledge, incontinent. Anyway, they set the box aside and started the process of packing & sorting keepers from donations. When I got out of school for the day, I swung by to help my dad do some grunt work. He wasn't ready for furniture to be moved yet, so he tasked me with packing the china from the china hutch carefully into a box for my aunt. I didn't have any packing paper, saw the Depends box and figured "Ah, these will protect the dishes." I unfold the first diaper and there's a roll of ones and some rolled quarters inside. Next one had more rolls of coins and a pair of earrings. At that point I called my folks in. My grandma had carefully hidden her money and her valuables inside diapers figuring that theives wouldn't look there.

Old folks that lived through the Great Depression are seriously clever treasure hiders.

TEA: We also money hidden in the freezer and in a couple of canisters in the cupboard.

A dilligent theif would check the more alternatve hiding spots, so you really have to get ingenius.