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Saturday, August 20th
American Family Safety is a family-owned company that helps families deal with adversity arising from hurricanes, floods, forest fires, tornadoes, mudslides, terrorism, and even the threat of nuclear attack. Their safety and disaster kits contain water, food, lighting, clothing, and other essentials that the Coast Guard and FEMA recommend in times of emergency. Food and water products are approved by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, withstanding temperatures between 22 and 149 degrees, and having a shelf life of 5 years. All items are designed, manufactured, packaged, and distributed from Vista, California USA.
Two types of kits: safety and disaster
The American Family Safety website divides the kits into two main categories: safety and disaster. The kits are further divided into subcategories for convenience in finding just the right kit tailored for specific locations and scenarios. Safety kits are divided into home, office, car, school, senior, transit and commuter, pet, and outdoor. Disaster kits are divided into blackout, flood, earthquake, hurricane, wildfire, terrorism, winter, water supplies, MRE food rations, and first aid supplies.
Tools make it easy to decide
The website's Kit Helper feature assists you in deciding how to tailor your kit for your location, types of potential disasters, people in your home, pets, and other factors. For example, running the Kit Helper for a 6-person, 1-dog household in Florida yielded three affordable kit options that appeared to meet the needs of that family. The family kit was a 5-person 72-hour kit. For the sixth person, you should buy a 1-person kit because it's not really possible to ration the resources of the 5-person kit. The dog kit was particularly comprehensive and contained more items than most people might anticipate for a dog's needs in a disaster.
Helpful side-by-side comparison
If you want to compare some of the 72-hour kit contents side-by-side, there is a handy comparison chart to see all the items contained in each 3-person 72-hour kit. And the website includes a planning and preparation page with dozens of links to authoritative websites and articles on disaster survival.
Corporate survival kits available
There is also a section for corporate kits that can be tailored to your brand look and feel and values. Corporate kits are customizable as to the items they contain and can create goodwill by showing employees that the company cares about their safety, health, and well-being.
30 day return policy, military discount
American Family Safety has some customer-friendly policies. The site offers a 15% discount to all active-duty members, veterans, and reservists. Also, customer support allows for a money-back return of any product within 30 days of purchase. However, all returned items must be new, unused, and unopened.
No customer feedback found
On the downside, no customer satisfaction reviews or BBB entries were found for American Family Safety.
Nice site, just needs some shopper reviews
The site is beautifully designed and well-organized. However, without reviews or a BBB listing to compare customer experiences, we have to stop short of giving American Family Safety our highest rating for survival gear retailers. We hope that, in the future, the company makes it easier to see what customers have to say about their products and the overall shopping experience.
No matter where you live, there is some risk of an event that will cause you to potentially need survival gear. It could be earthquakes, floods, wildfires, tsunamis, volcanoes, or even civil unrest. You don't want to be without food, water, power, first aid, and basic survival kits to get you through times of uncertainty.
Many companies offer survival gear online. Whether you're looking for made-ready-to-eat (MRE) meals for your "go bag" or if you're planning to shelter in place and eat from buckets full of dehydrated entrees, it's easy to find a number of stores where you can buy just about anything.
What's more difficult is knowing which ones are reputable, high-quality, and will honor their commitment to the customer by offering an easy, money-back guarantee on their wares should something arrive damaged or be generally unsatisfactory. With many stores competing for your emergency preparedness dollars, you need an idea of how to sort the good from the not-so-much.
Keep these criteria in mind as you browse stores offering survival gear:
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