Shopping at my LGS

I see the ammo, but where are the guns?

Atavar said:

Went out to my hole in the wall LGS to get a brick of over priced primers cuz I’m running low and well, the have some. They were priced right up there at $90/brick which is still a little cheaper than ordering online with shipping and hazmat.
They had a nice selection of powders (@$34/lb), a fair selection of bullets and all sorts of ammo. The shelves were full and ammo stacked on the floor.
I thought you might enjoy some pictures of what a rural gun shop inventory looks like.

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That's a really good selection, and you got a good price on the powder/primers. Aside from reloading supplies, the LGS in my area are pretty well stocked but they are not moving product because the prices are still too high for many people.

Much the same here, availability of common cartridges is not a problem, but prices are too high for me to bite.

Atavar said:

Actually there were only about a dozen guns, nothing special, notable only for the lack of pseudo military arms.

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So would you say this is a Fudd gun shop?

My locals don’t stock much in reloading supplies and don’t have ammo stacked like that. Both Cabelas and Dunhams do have ammo pretty much on the regular nowadays. Interestingly I’ve yet to see 38 or 357 on the shelf except a small amount of SD ammo. Not an issue for me as this is what I started reloading a year ago but just seems odd that all the other common calibers exist but those.

90 cents a brick is very close to the new MSRP I think I am seeing on the internet vendor's web pages (even though it is hard to find primers at that any price). I happened to stop in at Brownells last September and bought a box for around $80. The profiteers on the internet are asking 15 or 16 cents -- or sometimes more -- per primer, or $150 - $160 for a brick!

Atavar said:

Probably, but they have some pretty exotic ammo. .45 they pretty much expect you to roll your own except for fancy SD stuff. Some rifle calibers I never heard of before. A surprising amount of different .50BMG.
I even saw more than one kind of .700 Nitro Express. Dog knows what you hunt with that up here. Grizzly? That’s overkill even for Polar Bear isn’t it? The owner must have one.
A good supply of all kinds of .410, 20 and 16 gauge shells. Scads of garden variety 12 gauge.

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I haven't seen much .410 in over 2 years. My local farm/ranch store had a half dozen boxes last month. They were turkey loads, 5 rounds for $45. Yeah, you read that right, $9 a round. And they sold out!!!!!!

I've pretty much stopped buying anything gun related untill prices (Especially Ammo) come down to within reason. Except maybe some cleaning supplies. Now, In a few minutes or so some are going to pop up here and say ( well, prices are not coming down because yada yada yada ho ho ho). But, When suppliers see shelves filling up with no buyers, They will have to come down or start laying off. I think we've been all taken advantage of in the past couple years and its time for a change.

That’s a better supply of ammo than all 4 of my local LGS’s put together. Pretty remarkable.

Prices still suck everywhere... my local Sportsman's Warehouse stores keep getting in weird selections of ammunition with high prices, although what they have, they have in bulk. My local Bi-Mart, of all places, is maintaining decent, not great prices, but its stock goes quickly.

tws3b2 said:

Now, In a few minutes or so some are going to pop up here and say ( well, prices are not coming down because yada yada yada ho ho ho). But, When suppliers see shelves filling up with no buyers, They will have to come down or start laying off. I think we've been all taken advantage of in the past couple years and its time for a change.

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More'n a few minutes, more like a couple hours. But yeah, I'll be That Guy. Have you noticed the prices of metals lately? Brass, copper, steel, lead... They're not gonna go down significantly. Add to ever-worsening import restrictions, environmental issues (lots of states -- and more countries -- looking to ban lead ammo entirely), chip shortages (how do you think computers and machinery run?), etc.. How about the labor situation nationwide? Not even talking about the politics. More and more jurisdictions (primarily the liberal-led metropolitan regions) looking at "special" ammo taxes since that's an easy gun control option... and then there's California, where you need a BGC to buy the stuff. When folks can make almost as much on unemployment or more than $15 an hour at McDonald's, they're not lining up for manufacturing jobs where they're actually expected to perform labor.

We were not "taken advantage of," it's simply the way the market operates. I personally don't see things getting much better in terms of prices; availability has improved (for the near term) but we'll see how that goes.