I bought an emergency kit last year for my car. It gave me “peace of mind” and all that warm fuzzy marketing crap – but I ran into a problem when I actually had to use some of the stuff from the kit during a camping trip.
Specifically, my kit had one of those hand crank flashlights – and the lever part was so crappy that the handle broke off after -literally- two minutes of use.
Good thing I only had a midnight toilet emergency and not a real emergency.
Lesson learned, I’m all about quality over quantity in my emergency survival kits from now on. In fact I have a trick for identifying a low quality emergency kit:
When half your kit by weight is cheap as dirt packets of water, you’re not looking at good value for money.