I think a lot of this hand wringing and teeth gnashing is being done by those lacking in perspective. First, keep in mind we've just endured one of the worst ammo shortages since WWII. If you want some background, read Skeeter Skelton and his trials and tribulations as a young teen during WWII. Ammo was just unavailable. The war effort siphoned off all the supplies and manufacturing capacity.
What we've just endured over the last 18 or so months wasn't as bad. But people are more affluent now and expect/demand "just in time" convenience. They first laugh at those of us who sock things away, then criticize us for creating the shortages. Too bad, read about the squirrel and the grasshopper, or any of the other parodies. Those who save (be it ammo, food, fuel, or money) always seem to weather shortage situations better.
This cycle was clearly caused by a panic situation when those hostile to our rights were elected in mass. So those of us with a few extra bucks (the ones we didn't spend on music, concerts, over priced coffee, etc) went to the store and bought what we figured was enough to get us thru the crisis. Then when store shelves went empty, as they always do when people perceive a problem, those who didn't plan ahead began weeping and screaming.
The business community responded as they usually do. They're in business to make a living and profit. The stores discovered they couldn't get any replacement stock, so they raised the prices on what they had to make it last. The distributors also raised their prices, and as usual, took care of their friends and better customers first. The manufacturers did the logical. They started working overtime and even increased utilization as much as practical. But they also devoted their attention to the high profit, high volume products.
Then the lower volume items were swept from the supply chain by even more panic buying. After that, those with profit as a motive began scouring their closet shelves, selling on the secondary market anything they could double or triple their original money on.
.41 Magnum ammo is just one of a fair number of casualties. Those of us with adequate supplies barely noticed the blip. Those who felt a partial box was enough started to worry. Driving down to the gunshop and buying another box was the first response. But the merchants all took a look at the new price sheets from their supplier and the next column that said "out of stock". So by the time the poor guy with the 41 got to the store, the guys who'd planned ahead already emptied the shelves, or ran the stock way down. The merchant had doubled the price on the box of 50. The non-planner takes a look at the $50 price for an item he'd paid $22 for last year and gets mad. He's not paying that price (so he's not shooting.)
The calibers we define as obsolete will come back. Even Jet ammo sometimes turns up. And we all know from time to time Hornady rolls out a lot of .222, and Remington sells slick bags of 100 Jet brass. We went thru that same ordeal back in the late 80s with .45-70 ammo. Some of it had languished for a long time on dealers shelves. I went to a gunshow downstate in 1990. A buddy went along, just for the day (he later kind of regretted it.) At the first ammo laden table, a guy had factory 300 grain ammo for $5 a box. But he instantly came down to $4, and said if I took it all, he'd let me have it for $3! Wow!
So I bought all he had. About 2 aisles along, some guy saw us toting all that obsolete ammo and asked where we'd gotten it. We told him, and the price, and he asked if we wanted 10 boxes more at that price. Yep. Soon it was time to make a trip to the truck.
Same situation with the old Remington .30-06 Accelerators. A year or so later they were everywhere. I just assume none had been sold for a long time and the merchants brought it in to dump it. If anything is cheap enough an I might use it, I'll buy.
Last year at the OGCA show some guy had over 300 .41 mag bullets on his table. $8 a hundred! No, not per 50, per 100! He wanted $25 for the lot, and it included the plastic reloading boxes he brought it in (50 size boxes, but you can get 2 bullets per divider.) Sounded too good to be true, so I bought them. Before that, I'd been buying the old style 100 count boxes whenever I'd seen them. Suddenly I went to put all the crap away and kind of straighten it out. I discovered over 1000 bullets not where they should have been.
A nice problem.
The reason for this sermon is simple. If you plan ahead, these little one or two year blips in the supply chain doesn't cause you anguish or heart ache. When you take a snapshot of the current situation, its easy to conclude we have not just obsolete calibers, but calibers like the .455 where we'll never see supplies again. But if you step into my reloading room, you get the idea all is well in the world. It is, in my world.
