Coming from a gun shop employee, there is some good information on how to improve on this thread (used gun updates, hours, etc) , but it's also the old adage of "Walk a mile in another mans moccasins"
A lot of the whiners on this thread that would in fact drive 50 miles to save $20, think that we "owe" you inexpensive transfers, then run to Walmart to buy their ammo are usually the first ones to b**** that there are no good local gun shops near them....
Of course one problem with the ammo is that the mid levels
**** up the pricing of the ammo. Walmart is effectively a mid level and consumers are buying ammo at whatever walmart pays for it and probably a pretty fixed profit margin on top of that. The other mid levels
**** around with the gun shops so badly on ammo availability and pricing, it would not surprise me if dealer cost in some cases is WORSE than the price someone pays at walmart.... which is why during the Obamascares and Sandy Hookmaster fun land deals a lot of small gun shops were hitting up walmarts because their mid levels wouldn't send them stuff or had priced themselves out of existence. The mid levels also liked doing hula hoop chicken neck jive turkey shit like getting in a pallet of .380 or whatever the tough stuff was to get and camping on it for a month or two and watching the price go up. (anyone that thinks the distis didn't do this stuff is delusional) companies like ATK/Remington/Winchester were going all out 24/7/365 production and yet there was this precipitous, nasty lag in the market, outside of the ammo that showed up at walmarts and then quickly disappeared. It's pretty obvious the mids all had the same thought at around the same time and turtled on ammo so they could profit from the huge price spike. The only saving grace is a lot of the gun shops actually stuck their hand up and said "No, I'm not going to buy your case of .380 that costs $300... none of my customers are going to pay that much, I'd rather go without. "
This stuff all leaves the small gun shop in a pickle... sell ammunition making low or virtually no profit, or making 50 cents or a buck a box and getting called a "rapist". Or not having ammo on the shelf to sell. None of these are good situations.
This was less of a problem 10, 15 years ago when ammo was so cheap (due to a relatively constant supply glut) that a dealer could mark up a box of ammo $.50-$2.00 and nobody gave a shit because even marked up it was still really cheap. There's some economic term for it but I can't place it right now, price pressure or something like that. It's just like when gas was always under $2 a gallon.... way more people used big brand stations like Sunoco, Shell, etc that were slightly higher in price because they became insensitive to the price.
The other thing that is
****ing up ammo prices is 10-15 years ago there was CHEAP milsurp (and imported) ammo for every caliber imaginable all over the place, and the gun shops had tons of it. All of that stuff is almost COMPLETELY gone from the market. Blame the UN for that bullshit. If it wasn't for that IANSA/UN faggotry about countries getting rid of milsurp ammo america would still be awash in it. Hell even if the US didnt have that retarded law forcing demilling of surplus US military ammo the supply would be a lot better, the .gov probably demills (at taxpayer cost, I might add) millions of rounds of ammo every year that they could have just sold on the secondary market and recovered most of what they spent to buy it to begin with. This entire situation is mind numbing when you think about how awful it is.
For the "kids" reading this or people who only recently got involved in shooting but could have a long time ago, yes, you missed out. Big time. There were glorious days where we would buy like a case of 7.62 x 39 (for like $76!! or less!!) and burn up most of it at the range in one day. Or an entire case of 00 Buck magnums, or slugs, etc... and then burn up 500 rounds of .22LR at the end because it cost 8 dollars. the ammo was almost free. Those days are long gone. [sad2]
-Mike