Ed Ames
Member
It seems to me that in tough times standardization would be more important than diversifying into more calibers. Pick a handful of standard calibers and stock up on those.
They aren’t mutually exclusive and doing both will give you the greatest overall benefit.
If you just standardize you are dependent on your stock during rushes, and that leads to either investing a large amount of money and space in a huge stockpile, or rationing your shooting.
If you just diversify it becomes a different sort of logistics problem. Now you have greater chances of restocking, but you need to buy larger amounts of less popular ammo that may or may not be ideal for your primary use.
But if you do both, stock up on your main cartridges, but also diversify so you can use a broad range of cartridges, you have all the benefits of both strategies, and can moderate the downsides (you don’t need to stack the primary cartridges quite as deep, and you don’t need to buy larger amounts of less popular ammo - just what you want to shoot, as you shoot it).
It’s perhaps a little more expensive up front but ‘cheapest’ and ‘best‘ rarely go together.