I love the whole “we’ll use gold to buy necessities when the Mad Max scenario hits” idea. Let’s see how this works:
1) Walk to the store with some of your gold coins and buy food.
2) Your starving neighbors notice the one guy on the street carrying food back to his house and surmise that he must have some gold.
3) Your starving neighbors storm your house and steal all of your food and gold. You shoot a couple of them before they overrun and kill you.
There is also the alternate scenario in which private ownership of gold is again outlawed by the federal government as happened under FDR. In that scenario the story goes like this:
1) Walk to the store with some of your gold coins and try to buy food.
2) The clerk freaks out when he sees gold coins instead of the federally-issued emergency ration coupons and presses the button under his cash register.
3) Blackwater goons attached to the store (to prevent rioting) grab you, throw a hood over your head and load you into a truck to be taken to a FEMA camp for some extreme sports activities like waterboarding.
Maybe you think you can escape the Mad Max world of Southern California and carry your gold coins off to someplace safer like Costa Rica or Australia? That scenario is quite entertaining as well:
1) Walk through a federal checkpoint X-Ray machine in an airport or at a border (could even be state or city borders if the SRHTF) on your way out of town.
2) Ding ding ding goes the metal detector.
3) The TSA gangstaz confiscate all of your gold coins which they then melt down to make new grillz for their teeth. Just for fun they take your shoes too.
Sorry I just ain’t buying it — now having a garden and some chickens and goats I can see. Having stores of food and water, I see that. Having a gun and some bullets and basically laying low for a while, I see that too. Walking down the street with gold doubloons in your pocket? Not so much but hey if you think it’ll work more power to you.