Yes and no. It depends on who buys out the production capacity. If all those shitty mid level distributors do it, anyone who doesn't stockpile is going to get
raped (more) the next time there's a demand spike on the ammo market.
Mids upon hearing WalMart is basically exiting the bulk ammo business:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiUj_pzCiAQ
The Mids that service most small dealers,, pretty much rape the shit out of smaller FFLs. You can tell when an FFL is buying an ammo from a mid because you take 10-20% off of it and it's still stupidly overpriced. The signs are pretty obvious, when dealers would clean out Wal Mart to buy ammo... that their mids were going full royphnol cosby on them.
The one useful thing that WalMart did was act as a slight "truth table" vs the rapey practices of mids on ammunition. Walmarts prices didn't fluctuate that much even
under duress. I suspect this is because their profit margin was always "cost + X%" where X really was a static value most of the time.
....
On the other hand... If the big buyers groups do it, then the consumer (generally) wins because those people are more likely to sell ammo to consumers at reasonable prices, because they're buying factory direct. No middlemen to f*** with the market and rape. Think volume leaders on ammo, larger gun shops like SO, 619DW, or ammo brokers like target sports, etc. Those guys don't buy their ammo from shitty mids, or at least they don't buy 85% of it from those a**h***s.
-Mike