Hoping to inject a little "insider" perspective on the ammo thing here...
Back at the start of the covid ammo shortage, I was running the gun department for a large independent sporting goods store. Among my duties were ordering, stocking, selling, managing inventory....basically running the entire department, including establishing sales policies.
I remember the day the ammo panic started, I was surprised , not only by the panic itself, but by how fast it happened. When customers hit the store and the panic-buying began, I jumped online to order from my distributor's inventory, and was shocked to see supplies drying up rapidly. By the end of the day, the nature of the business had undergone significant changes.
The realities of the business pretty much demanded some new policies. Without sales limits, we would have seen ammo being bought up in huge lots, going to hoarders who wanted as much for themselves as possible without concern for others who just wanted to do some shooting, and worse, to gun-show sellers who simply wanted to inflate prices to garner a quick profit. Further, as a practical business concern, it can be pretty darn difficult to sell a gun to someone, especially the large numbers of new first-time buyers that we saw, if you can't supply them with at least one or two boxes of ammo.
The policies that resulted from the new realities were, I thought, reasonable. First, I put in reserve 1-2 boxes of ammo for every gun in inventory. I did not conceal this fact from anybody, and for the most part my customers understood. Furthermore, any caliber/gauge/type that was in short supply had purchase limits placed on it, along with a total daily limit on all ammo. This was implemented, again, to preclude volume purchasing by resellers, who would otherwise buy anything they could lay hands on, even if they didn't own a gun for it.
Every day I searched for ammo, and every day policy specifics were reconsidered and tweaked to reflect current supplies. Every day, I answered to the best of my ability the same questions about "what's going on with ammo." Every day, I experienced the same frustration with my inability to help my customers to their complete satisfaction.
There are some dealers, I have no doubt, that scalped prices and did some nefarious things from a strict profit motive, and I imagine some of that is still going on. It is, at least a little bit, understandable; retail business is, at the end of the day, about making money. And to be perfectly honest, that was my long-term goal as well, but my approach was to earn my customer's business and loyalty by taking care of as many of them as possible, treating them fairly and honestly, with the hope that they would remember that if and when "things returned to normal." By the time I retired in '22 things had settled down quite a bit, and it seemed that my customers had, at least somewhat, decided I'd earned their business.
Well, that's my two cents on the subject. It seems like shortages are going to be a fact of life for the foreseeable future. If I'm trying to make a point here, I guess it's that the guy down at the gun store is trying to keep a business IN business. He has decisions to make to do that. Some of them might be frustrating, but he's probably plenty frustrated too.
