Sunday, June 8, 2014

Ammo Shortage - Coming To An End?

About time I say. Gun Watch notes that the price rollback signs that Wal Mart is so fond of are now appearing at the ammo shelves. 12 ga, for example is reported to be down to pre-panic prices. Last time I was there I noticed that they had sufficient stock of pretty much everything with the sole exception of .22. They were also back to the usual practice of having one sales associate assigned per acre of floor space and that associate was not in vire of the sporting goods department.

The predictions are cheerfully optomistic, bur one can hope:
Metal prices have already fallen from the highs of the bubble.  Copper and lead are far lower than they were.    You will know that the bubble is close to the bottom when you see .22 LR on sale for below 4 cents per round.  At the lowest, we might see .22 cartridges below $10 for 500.
Missed the gun show last weekend so I don't know if the crash is genuinely starting around here, but I do know there is  plenty of .22 out there waiting for its owners to realize that +$65/brick is no longer a viable assumption.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I do wonder if the .22 staying scarce is a matter of a longer-term increase in demand from a bunch of newer shooters that exceeds production capacity. It's always been the go-to starter/plinker/cheap-shooting/whatever cartridge. Anyone new likely has a .22 of some sort that's seeing a lot of use for practice, And everybody else is grabbing whatever they can find to keep piles of older guns fed. If new ammo production has to be built this could last a while.

Billll said...

I think that's a pretty good guess. A lot of new shooters, with a lot of .22's = a lot of demand for "cheap" .22 which then drives the supplies to extinction. It will come back, but it will likely take a bit longer. It is happening and I've seen the price drop significantly already.