Price gouging and ripoffs on ammo

[Bull Nutria]

My friend, the trapper bought 100 CCI mini mag HP from a LGS in a nearby town for $25 and a 500 brick of Centurion LRN for $115. both are about 3 times what the normal selling price is!! the trapping season is over on March 31 so my friend has enough ammo to make it. if he runs out i'll give him some of my stash.

I went my a LGS to visit with the owner and told him about the above he said it was price gouging.He told me he sells at his normal mark up. he told me that he expected this shortage to last about 3-4 months.

Academy had some 22 ammo early this morning but was out at 12:30 when i went by there at lunch. they did have a few boxes of 223 and some 308 on the counter.

Bull

 

[Spymaster]

Its not price gouging, and your pal hasn't been ripped off! We don't OWE YOU a pricepoint! Its called capitalism for a reason, don't like capitalism? Continue the voting trend and very soon you won't have anything to bitch about price wise, because you won't be allowed to buy it anyway.

 

[wankerjake]

It seems to me that if somebody has a stake in something so much that he makes it a livelihood or relies on income in any way, he should stock up on essentials for his business when prices are good. That would be a pretty reasonable thing to do. If I was a trapper, I'd have ammunition on hand to last me the whole season, especially when pre-panic prices were ~$25/500.


There's not enough to go around to everyone right now. The ammo went to somebody who really needed it and was willing to cough up the dough for ammunition in stock. The trapper who really needs ammunition was able to get some because one store in town understands a supply and demand curve.


So, where's the beef?

 

[SharpsDressedMan]

Why did you buy it if it was overpriced?

 

[TBH]

I think more importantly, we need to keep a list of dealers who are gouging and when prices return to normal, boycott them. I reload so I haven't been watching ammo prices but when primers go from $30-40 to $70 and up I get twisted. :banghead:
I laugh at the ar prices. Six months ago I read a post that Les Baer ARs are way over priced. Now their patrol model is a steal at $1700.

 

[Vector]

I agree that some are taking advantage to the point of price gouging.

During hurricanes you expect to pay more because of supply and demand during several weeks afterward. However when you see people charging $20 for a bag of ice, I feel like reporting them for price gouging(which is against the law locally during disasters.

Then you also have the capitalist system that allows you to charge anything you want. Since it is worth as much as people are willing to pay, people will either be forced out of business, reduce their prices until they generate sales, or make insane profits because people snap up everything at huge mark ups.

So who is at fault is the chicken/egg situation.

 

[9mmepiphany]

I went my a LGS to visit with the owner and told him about the above he said it was price gouging.

He doesn't understand the meaning of the word

 

[nelsonal]

It makes a whole lot more sense to me to charge and pay $20/ bag of ice after a hurricane than $0.40 shell for ammo. In the former case everyone is better off when a guy with a truck drives say 300 miles to bring ice generators etc there and his personal costs are likely to be high and demand will be temporary so he's not going to invest in a way to do it mpre efficiently. In this case I understand the motivation behind the spymasters who speculated successfully or have a low opportunity cost of hitting several outdoor stores to clear their stock for resale, but I'm utterly baffled at what is driving the buyers. Dry firing for a few months and waiting to amass a stockpile seem like obviously more prudent options to me. If the party that didn't ride a wave of elector fury at the last gun control law into power didn't have an unassultable hold on the house, or serious attempts at bullet control were debated sure, everyone panic, but in an environment where a few days focus allows a sizable stash to be built at relatively low prices it's baffling that buyers remain this panicked.

 

[Sam1911]

If you need it, buy it. If you don't need it, wait a bit.

People seem to confuse "normal price" with "this is what the price SHOULD be for some reason of cosmic order." Truth is that the price is whatever the price must be, as set by supply and demand EVERY . SINGLE . DAY.

When it is "only" $25 for 550, it is so because there's enough supply and little enough demand that the price stabilizes there. And manufacturers limit how much they make in order to balance that price point where they're able to be both competitive and profitable.

When it is being made in the multiple MILLIONS OF ROUNDS A DAY and it is still selling out in minutes? The buyer sets the price and the price she flies!

As it is, as it was, as it should be! In this corner of the world we call it market Capitalism.

 

[Phatty]

This isn't an example of price gouging. Price gouging generally occurs when a person finds themselves in an emergency situation where essential products (think baby formula) are sold to customers vastly in excess of the market value to take advantage of the dire situation the customer finds themselves in.

If a particular condition affects the entire market (such as a country wide supply shortage), the resultant increase in prices is not price gouging, but a simple adjustment to the supply/demand pricing curve. For example, if there was some kind of plant disease that killed off most of the world's coffee supply, you'd suddenly find coffee prices skyrocketing (and that wouldn't be price gouging either).

One thing to keep in mind is that you do not know what your LGS is being charged for the ammo. If the LGS's distributor has hiked up its pricing, how can you complain when the LGS similarly increases its prices as well. Should the LGS sell the ammo at a loss to you?

Sure it sucks that you have to pay a lot more for a product now than you did a year ago, but that happens all the time so get used to it.

 

[Al Thompson]

Phatty's right. Unless you are in the middle of a gunfight, it's impossible to gouge ammo prices. We ain't going through that again.