Yeah I just got one. After the last shortage most .22 shooters think under 5000 rnds is running out. 2000 rnds is nothing to some guys, they really stocked up during the good times over the last couple yrs.
Agreed. I shoot small bore 3P competition as well as bullseye (under whatever name the NRA chooses to call it), so the prior shortage hit me hard as prior to it, I bought ammo every few months about 2000 rounds at a time.
Since that last ammo shortage, I took advantage of low prices and high availablity and made a few buys of 10,000 rounds at a time of SK Std Plus and CCI SV as well as a brick or two here and there periodically when the local Walmart had CCI SV on sale.
None of those buys were during any shortage, and none of those buys were from vendors who jacked up prices during the last shortage. I won’t reward businesses who scalp by giving them my business. Not then, not now, not in the future.
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You see some common patterns and players in ammo shortages:
1) The big time dealers who jack up prices because ammo is in short supply and they see an opportunity to make an obscene profit.
2) You see the small time dealers who stalk places like Wal-Mart on the days the trucks arrive and buy up everything they have to re-sell at the local gun shows, usually charging 3-4 times what they paid. (These are the same folks who bought up all the toilet paper a year or so ago. I wouldn’t bother to take a whiz on them if they were on fire.)
3) Those small time sellers to some extent drive the price gouging by the large on line vendors as they reason if they don’t inflate their prices to make money, it’ll just get bought up by someone else who will resell it at an obscene profit.
4) The truth is that in most cases no real shortage exists or it is a very short term shortage as supply catches up with a surge in demand. The amount of ammo actually shot goes way down during a “shortage” as people mis-perceive ammo is in short supply, with their personal supplies on hand being seen as too expensive to replace.
5) At the same time, people who are “low” on ammo pay way too much just to ensure they have some, even though most of the, won’t actually shoot it. Worse, other (like the guy the OP observed) hoard and buy way more than they’ll need in case the “shortage” continues which is in fact what causes the shortage to continue.
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The irony is that the hoarding behavior continues well beyond any actual temporary shortage and both creates and extends any actual shortage.
People acting as a herd are incredibly stupid. Since you can’t get a critical mass of others to act intelligently and responsible, and since you also legally give hoarders a swift kick in the head, your only long term option is to plan ahead stock up when ammo is *not* in short supply and is available again at normal prices.
There’s additional irony in the fact that people who got caught short by an ammo shortage start stocking up way too soon and once again further extend the shortage and keep prices abnormally high.
For example $49 per brick for CCI SV is still way too high, but people will pay that trying to “stock up” and both keep prices high and supplies short. In contrast, the last buy I made of CCI SV was about 2 years ago and I paid $25 per brick. I bought 10,000 rounds (and four 50 caliber ammo cans to put it in) from a brick and mortar store that had three pallets of it on display. I bought 5000 rounds the first trip, and then bought 5000 more a couple weeks later when it was obvious it wasn’t selling fast at all.
