I found this box of 22's and I thought it was kinda funny considering the prices and availability right now. Oh the fun of plinking. I inherited this little box, so I am not sure when it was bought. My guess is in the 70s.20211202_211638.jpg any one else have any

I don't have any, but I certainly remember buying boxes of 22 LR for around 50 cents a box and 5 bucks for a brick. Brings back a lot of memories. Spent a lot of paper route money on them!

A couple of years ago I was visiting my parents and found an old box of Remington .22LR ammo with a $0.39 price tag, from JC Penney no less. Every round fired on the first try.

Don't have any now, but I shot a good bit of Wildcat when I was a kid.

__________________
The best I can with what I got

Back in the late 1970s-early 1980s, I bought a lot of similar boxes of .22 LR at a nearby Target store. I don't remember the prices at that time though. When I was a kid, .22 Shorts were a quarter a box, LRs were 40 cents. I used Shorts mainly.

I just went downstairs and checked my stash. I have that same box, only my price sticker of $ .79 was from Venture, an old department store. Also found a box of Remington Mohawk, with no price tag. Too lazy to take a photo.

I certainly remember paying $5 per brick for .22LR, and the box of 500 was still brick shaped back then. I suspect most of us on this forum have the same memory.

The "Wildcat" line of .22 rimfire ammo was a promo brand of the 1980s period. Moderate pricing, packaged in the traditional 50-round boxes and 500-round bricks, widely available at the Big Box stores.

Until the 1970s many large retail store chains offered .22 ammo under their own house brands (Western Auto-Revelation, Sears, Montgomery Ward-Hawthorne, and many others). Mass produced by the major ammo companies, packaged in the company's preferred brand labels.

Also, the major ammo makers frequently offered several quality levels under different brand names. Federal's "Monarch", Winchester "Wildcat", Remington "Thunderbolt" and others. Frequently less performance (accuracy, reliability) so less critical in the manufacturing processes, at a price point that appealed to many casual users.

As a kid in the 1950s I had access to a .22 single-shot rifle and by 1962 I had one of my very own. Purchased a lot of .22LR for 29 cents per box, but shot more .22 Shorts at 27 cents per box. By the mid-1960s the CCI Mini-Mag ammo came on the market with big performance claims, but it was 79 cents per box and that was a major consideration at the time.

My first .22 rifle came from the S&H Green Stamps Redemption Store, acquired with books and books filled with trading stamps from my mom's grocery shopping. Got my first shotgun the same way, but they made me bring in a parent to pick that up (no one thought anything about a kid getting a .22 rifle!).

__________________
Life of the party until 8:00PM

In the early 70's every Friday on my way home from work I would stop at KMart and buy a couple of 100-round plastic boxes of CCI Mini Mags for 99 cents. I still have all those boxes and reload them with bulk Federal ammo now.

When I was a kid, we used to go to the base and buy 22 shorts for 10 cents a box.
I still have several boxes of Remington plastic pacs of 100 marked 1.99.
I opened a 19 cent box of 22 Outers patches the other day.

__________________
Pete
I ain't no fortunate son

I have a few sliding lid 1970s CCI mini mag plastic 100 round cases from Kmart with a red .79 cent sticker on them. One is still unopened with orig ammo in it.

Bob

I have several different boxes from that era. My rabbit hunting buddy and I were too broke back then to buy bricks between mortgages and wives lol

I remember Wildcats, probably late 80s/early 90s.

Its funny, but I remember most places ran . 22s for . 97-.99 cents a box back in my day. Since I had a job as a young man, you would of course but a brick for about $10. You felt like a real gosh darn grownup. Then you'd do it again a month later. And so on. Not that I ever shot much of it.

Fast forward 30 years, a lot of that ammo kept me going through these recent droughts!!!

Yep!
Always got a brick of Remington Thunderbolts in my xmas stocking.

__________________
213th FBINA

I remember those.........
shot a lot of them when I was a teenager out of the old Winchester and Reminton bolt actions.
I can't remember the model number but the back tapered down in rings getting smaller and smaller
until it came to the end, where a red metal end would stick out when the rifle was ready to fire.

Ah, the good old days.
We kids did not care if the ammo was accurate, just that it went bang, so we could get to the next round.

When I tell relatively new shooters I remember $5 bricks of .22 LR ammo they don't believe me. Then I tell them before things went crazy $7.99 to $9.99 A brick was very normal, they still don't believe me. That is until I show them adds in old gun magazines and a price marked brick of Federal .22s marked $8.99.

__________________
Freedom is never free!!
SWCA #3437

Great memories.I don't think we will see anything close to that in our lifetime.I just paid .60 a round for .38 special 125 gr flat points and thought that I got a good deal.I paid .12 a piece for the same rounds in early 2019.Just goes to show where we are today.

Maybe a Remington 511/512/513 series?

__________________
The best I can with what I got

I don’t go in there often, so they may have it well hidden, but the Target Store here is so woke I can’t imagine them selling it. Just passing a display of ammo on the way to buy cologne might give their “target” customers a severe case of the vapors!

Froggie

Yeah right. You should show them the ads for surplus 1911s or Springfield 1903A3s for $39.

I got my 03 FFL in about 1998 and had many old rifles and ammo delivered right to my house. Some really nice Mosins and Mausers for as low as $16. It even included a bayonet and a leather ammo pouch!!

Google Gunbroker to see what they are selling for these days.....LOL. I was at a gun show last month and saw the very same bayonets (no rifle) for $195.

Ahhhhh, the good old days.

I never got a gun with those but my mom got me a scooter with S&H stamps. I eventually developed an ache in my push off leg and gave up scootering. I assume the diagnosis today would be scooter carpal tunnel.

__________________
Thirty characters. Exactly...

When I was growing up, I didn't live near any big stores. All we had were small general stores of the Mom & Pop variety. All of them carried .22 ammo, and usually a few boxes of shotshells which they sold by the shell - like a dime each as I remember. Usually only Federal. At that time, Federal's major market was in rural and small town general stores, gas stations, etc. I lived in Western Maryland in the late 1960s, and I bought a great many bricks of .22 LR (usually Federal or Peters) at a hardware store there at $5 per.

Don't forget the 510!
I called them the Remington beehives.

Lobo, S&H green stamps - man I had completely forgotten about those. When I was little, like 5 or 6 years old it was my job to put the stamps in the books.

If I remember correctly though you had to pay some money for the taxes on the item, you redeemed them for. Maybe I dreamt that but just another random thought.

Apologies for thread drift!

Same here, we bought all our shells at Howlands Hardware in Plain City Ohio. It was a true old school hardware, the floor creaked with every step and the whole place smelled like oil. The construction was of old school wood, and everything was in bulk that had to be weighed or measured and went home in brown paper with string or a brown paper sack.

Bingo !!

Looked it up...........

the Rem 511 has the back end that I remember.
It took out a lot of "Vermin", pheasants, frogs and other things that caught our attention.

I have six or eight bricks of Wildcat stuck away for the Grandkids to plink with Bought it bunch of years ago for way cheap well less than $10 a brick.

__________________
USMC 69-93 Combat Pistol Inst.

I remember walking to the Piggly Wiggly grocery store and buying
a 50 round box for 50 cents.

LOL, that was my first thought too.
As hard as it is to remember when ammo was once that cheap,
it is even harder to imagine it being sold at a Target store.

__________________
Send lawyers, guns & money...

I have a few bricks left from the early 90's when they were under $7 a brick .When I was in high school .22 shorts were .37 a box, Longs and Long rifle were .47 , not sure about the magnums. Winchester .22 Automatic was .79 a box and the WRF was about the same. I miss being able to reliably buy those last two off the shelf more than I do the cheap prices .

__________________
Grumpy Old Man With a Gun

I can't imagine Target or J.C. Penny's selling ammo. The world has changed.

Doesn't seem that long ago that Casey's gas stations sold 22 ammo, and some shotgun, I think.

You and me both! I had 100 round boxes of CCI Mini-Mags that I bought at K-Mart back in the mid-1980s that were marked $2.94. That's what I used all year in my club's .22 league.

I remember those too. I used to put them in the books for my grandmothers when we went to visit them.

But I can remember Woolworth's selling rifles in the late 1980s because that was after I moved to Maryland and I took a friend there where she bought her M-1 Garand at the Woolworth's in Frederick, MD.

"Maybe a Remington 511/512/513 series?" I still have my Remington 513 Target. Hang tag says $99.

__________________
Mike Maher #283

Best I remember that I bought at the time was in the 1990's. Federal 36 or 38gr copper washed hollow points in Bozeman, MT for $89.00 for a case of 4,000. We would shoot up a full case in two days at gophers (Richardson Ground Squirrels, or Picket Pins) in the valley, killing hundreds of them in the alfalfa fields.

I bought many cases of them and still have two unopened in my shop here in Iowa to this day.

__________________
Captain Dave Funk

Before the crunch I bought several bricks of 500 rounds of Federal 22lr ammo for $7.99. Normal price was $9.99. That was only 13 years ago before this shortage started.

__________________
Freedom is never free!!
SWCA #3437

I recently paid 40 cents for 22.
But that for one round!
Federal Punch direct from Federal.
It does seem to be good Ammo.
But it don’t feed in my problem child Beretta 21a.
Works great in my Ruger LCP !

__________________
NRA LIFE MEMBER

I have this old box of "Nimrod" .22 shorts I bought back in the late '50s. I don't remember the price.



"Nimrod" was the Whites Auto "store brand" at the time.

__________________
Lorin

A Spanish Mauser, a Swiss Schmidt-Rubin and an unissued Springfield 03A3 all came from Woolworths in the early 1970's. As I recall they all cost $19 - $39.

Had a Stevens bolt .22 growing up. Bought ammo at Monkey Wards, Piggy Wiggly and western Auto. Think it was around $.39 a box. Bought lots of Wildcat when ALCO stores closed. Somewhere around $3/brick. Still have some. Had a Weatherby .22 that would shoot 1 inch groups at 100 yards with Wildcat in the late 70's.

Growing up in the 70s in small town Iowa, I can remember the Holiday gas stations had their store brand 22s for 59 cents a box of 50. They also had centerfire ammo in their brand and Federal shotshells. They also had rifles and shotguns in an open display rack next to all the hunting accessories. No child locks or clerk to show it to you, just pick one up and check it out yourself. You'll never see that again. And sporting goods counters in Target and JC Penny's in the city with guns and ammo. When I was 15, I got a CVA 1861 Navy kit from Target and a shooters kit for it.

I started shooting with my Dad in the 1960's. His ammo was all from the late 1930's, before he went to WWII. They all fired perfectly.

We bought new stuff then and it was perfect as well.

In the 1980's I bought a bunch of Remington and it was lousy. Lots of bangs not booms. I swore off the stuff ad switched to everything else.

I still have a lot of the "pre-disaster" ammo and I'm saving it. Anything bought since about 2008 is going first. Of course, if I'm in a match and don't need no alibis, I'm using vintage CCI.

When I was a kid our local 7-11 sold .22s and shotgun shells.

__________________
Richard

The last two cases of WildCat that I purchased were $89 each. That was for 5000 rounds.

It was sometime in the 80s, but I can not recall when

__________________
"Acta non verba"

Neat box! From the style of it I am guessing it was made in Canada by CIL. Besides selling their own brand they made ammo for a few hardware store chains and a couple of the smaller big box chain stores. I have a few different boxes of theirs in my collection.

Back in the immediate pre-Obama days (2007-2008), Wal-Mart was still selling the Remington "Golden Bullet" bulk pack boxes of 550 rounds for $9.99/box + tax. I still have several of them.

The Remington "Beehive" is also on my semi-auto Model 550-1.

During July of last year a local shop cleaned out its storeroom and put boxes of .22 LR ammo going clear back to Remington "dog bone" through the red, and white Hi-Speed and Peters High Velocity on the used table along with old holsters and scope mounts. I filled an ammo can at $0.50 per box. All clean. Still left a bunch for the next guy.

__________________
I need ammo, not a ride.