There are 5,000 WalMarts in the U.S. Let's assume that your store is reasonably representative of other WalMart stores, that they get in an order once a week and they're talking about the 325 round bulk boxes.
That's 16,250,000 rounds a week going to WalMarts around the U.S.--about 845,000,000 a year.
The manufacturing capacity for .22LR is somewhere around 4.2Billion rounds a year. 4.2billion divided by 845 million is about 5.
That means about a fifth of the entire manufacturing volume of .22LR would going to WalMarts.
If we assume that they're talking about the 550 round bulk boxes and that's fairly representative of what other WalMarts are getting in then WalMarts around the country are retailing more than a third of the entire .22LR manufacturing volume.
Here's another way to look at it.
4.2 billion rounds per year is about 81 million rounds a week. Let's say it all goes into 500 round bricks. That's about 162 thousand bricks a week. Let's say that every single one of those bricks goes to a WalMart store. No other retailer gets so much as a single round. Let's say that the bricks are distributed evenly amongst the 5,000 WalMart stores in the U.S.
If that happened, then each WalMart in the U.S. would get 32 or 33 bricks a week.
When you consider that WalMart is only one of many ammo retailers in the country, it should now be obvious that ten bulk boxes a week per WalMart store is actually a lot of ammo--especially viewed in terms of what's actually being produced.
Taking the information above, it should now be obvious that it only takes a few people to keep the WalMart shelves empty of ammo. Even if ALL the .22LR ammo were going to WalMarts exclusively, it would only take 10 or 11 people per WalMart store to clean the shelves if each one bought the 3 brick limit.
Numbers don't lie and that a good way to explain even though that's assuming that every walmart would even sell 30 boxes a week; I bet that's not the case.
Regardless, your numbers paraphrase well.
But in this case, they don't jive either.
Generally speaking, we went from 'no one' complaining about 22lr to 'everyone' complaining practically over night 3 yrs ago. It wasn't over the course of a year we gradually saw they decline of availability.
And it wasn't just 22lr.... it was almost everything except shotgun ammo.
However, everything has come back now for quite some time Except 22lr.
Also keep in mind that while there was a big increase in gun sales, 22lr would have been maybe 10% of those new guns... at very most? Not many new models of 22's which tells us that most interest is in center fire.
Either we were at the very edge of having a natural supply/demand/price issue as a result of new shooters AND by bad luck timing the Banic and wacko killers hit at the same. - Meaning, the perfect storm. When the scale tilted, it didn't just tilt; it actually tipped so hard it fell off the table. And with out additional supply, this is the reality into the foreseeable future.
Or, Mfg'rs aren't making what they say they are.
And that would certainly explain why a lot of us are saying that the retail stores aren't getting the same qtys they used to.
No one seems to be addressing that issue here.
I wonder if one of you re-loader people could help fill in the blanks for me.
9mm has roughly 3 times the lead as 22lr.
Does a 9mm brass weigh 3 times what a 22lr brass weighs?
What about the powder?.
If its all roughly 3x (keeping in mind the primer difference), then I'm guessing the ammo mfg'rs have decide that 22lr will no longer be less profitable than 9mm.
And the craziness of the market is a reflection of the internet age when things go 'viral' and 'crowd sourcing' have proved to have dramatic and very rapid swings.
