Says it is due to the certain amount of risk involved from sellers that don't provide him with their ffl info when requested and sometimes send guns with no paperwork at all, just a gun in a box.
There's no requirement that FFL info accompany a firearm that comes into a shop, but he's got to show the source of each gun he enters in his log. so instead of raising a price why not make it incumbent on the buyer of the firearm that some sort of identification of the seller be included in the box?
I'd submit that you guys up in the greater Seattle area are being taken for an additional amount of profit because the opportunity is there.
When I lived in Calif bay area, all of the local dealers, members of a large assn. of gun sellers, agreed to jack the price - one went so far as to finally raise his to $100. The reason given was that his counter time was expensive and that doing transfers took his people away from making sales. There may have been a measured validity in that but I felt that the real reason was that each sale made by some internet low-coster to one of the local customer base affected their bottom line, and did so more heavily with each passing month. I'd bet that the Seattle dealers are seeing the same sort of situation.
These poor gun dealers. They try so hard to maintain ther brick and mortar business while the times they are a changing. Most don't have the knowhow or the energy, much less the inclination, to join in the internet profit machine. Some do and for them the doing of transfers is no big deal because they're making money on the other end by selling online if they can access junk to sell. It takes a high volume to get the price breaks that a place like Bud's in Kentucky enjoys and can pass on to us in new gun pricing - Kentucky allowed for them to get big enough to do it their way. But psuedo California Washington state makes it near impossible to be a high volume seller like Bud's. The state tax structure pinches harder the bigger you get, and there's an underlying legislativve ill will toward guns in this state. It might help some to vote out the current bitch, I don't know.
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But now wait a minute - who's fault is this really? We want the dealer to stay in business so he'll be there to transfer our guns in from here and there, but heck no we won't pay his price to buy one from him! He's a ripoff, there's ten places on the net that'll sell me a Colt cheaper than he does! It's shouted high and low on boards like this. I'd be a fool to buy from the local schmoe and pay that price, and pay the tax, and pay, and pay. I'm smarter than that and I know where the good deals are and get them - I'm so smart that I put my local dealer right out of business and wonder what the matter with him is.
Jeez, I miss that place. It was neat to be able to go in there and talk guns for a while..... Why, old Mike would always keep a pot of coffee ready, and remember how he was always the first to donate a prize to be given at our local club matches? Man, he was one of the good ones - Too bad THEY drove him out of business, isn't it?
