Actually, we are beginning to need them now:
An Amazon delivery driver was held up at gunpoint by two masked men at 84th and South Hermitage Tuesday morning, marking the 12th armed robbery of a delivery driver in Chicago since December.
“They walked up on me, they had ski masks and told me, ‘You know what it is…’”
UPS is also experiencing similar robberies. The delivery company said their drivers are trained to be aware of their circumstances and to contact police if they have concerns about their surroundings.
I suspect when the Apocalypse is in its depth, food distribution will have to be done via home deliveries made by heavily armored and armed delivery vehicles, from heavily fortified warehouses in nay communities sufficiently close to impoverished areas.
Any store which allows access to mass quantities of food to the general populace will be subject to flashmobbing. The flashmobs will savage any unfortunate citizens in the stores as badly as the food supply. As that occurs, citizens will feel less and less safe visiting such locations. As business diminishes, and flashmobbing destroys stores, the number of stores remaining will dwindle, concentrating the continuing flashmobbing on the few remaining stores, until such stores cease to be viable business enterprises.
At that point, citizens will log on, place their orders, and receive them from armed deliverymen, who will not screw around when the shit begins to hit the fan.
There may actually be booming economic activity in the more homogenous towns and exurbs during the happening/dollar collapse, especially in red states. If the more rural food distribution networks can stay up it may not be so bad for the average prepared citizen as well. Preparation and location is key however.
Maybe the rich will get their food delivered in armored trucks, but ordinary Russians find the least expensive food in outdoor bazaars watched over by Chechen gangsters. These guys combine the intelligence of white people with the fertility, ferocity, and tribal loyalty of Muslims, and if you fuck with either the vendors or the customers, they will teach you how much pain the human body can suffer without dying.
Flash mobs are only a problem in unarmed communities. In areas where there are little to no restrictions on carrying weapons, the escalating threat will simply inspire citizens to not leave home without it. This might even be encouraged by local public safety announcements.
I was near a flash mob when it erupted. Its density was such that citizens would have only had to aim at the bolus of human garbage, like fish in a barrel.
You simply have to live where citizen self-protection and action are possible on a mass scale.