My local reloading shop owner claims that most reloading components from the major players (Federal, Remington, Winchester) are basically overages from ammunition loading. Cases, bullets & primer components generally are leftovers or intentional overproduction from the primary line of business, ammunition manufacturing. This makes sense, since annual component sales couldn't really add up to real business relative to loaded ammunition.
We have major ATK (Federal/Alliant/etc) facilities locally and as supply as ebbed and flowed of Federal primers the guys who work those plants and shop at this store said that they were working 24/7 filling military contracts for small arms ammo components. At the time (2007) they said the military had put a big enough dent in their ammo stockpiles with Afghanistan and Iraq that they were buying in big enough quantities to keep the plants humming on those contracts alone, leaving civilian commercial to take the back seat, and civilian commercial components even farther back. .41 Mag bullets have always seemed a little seasonal.
It also seems that over the last few years (since at least 2007) that some components have been tricky to come by -- Federal primers being a big one, and its not hard to see panic buying as a result of the massive Democratic majority or the crashing economy driving the fairly inelastic components marketplace into real scarcity, especially if you buy the idea that loaded ammo gets done first and leftovers feed the component market.
I also wonder what effect the massive runup in commodities prices for metals like copper, lead and tin up to the "crash" of 2008 had on ammo/components availability. There's a lot of ways that could hamper current demand -- either getting stuck with long-term contracts that guaranteed what might have seemed like smart prices (eg, late 2007 price levels) and being stuck now with high priced raw materials. Or the opposite, only buying bare minimums and then being unable to meet short-term increases in demand.
The other explanation for what I think is the longer term shortage is the much higher demand for ammo by LEOs in a post-9/11 world. Pre-9/11 most cops carried shotguns in their squads, now many departments carry 5.56 rifles of some kind. Increased training and increased staffing of security-related positions (street cops, airport cops, Federal cops, private security, etc) has to also be driving demand, and probably a certain amount of hoarding as well.
I'm sure long-term reloaders have seen these shortages before and have learned accordingly. I've mostly learned, but am up short on some calibers I've fairly recently gotten into; no 147gr 9mm bullets, for example, but I have learned that 5000 is pretty much the minimum primer order.
