This is a long boring post on the joys of modern retail logistics from someone who has seen it peripherally from the IT department for years.
What you are seeing is the benefit of Just-In-Time inventory practices in the retail industry.
My guess is that retailers, who start stocking for “Holiday” in about August, don’t consider ammo to be a big “Holiday” seller. Space at distribution centers (DCs) is limited, especially around the holidays. DCs have to make sure they have enough of the right stuff to stock their stores and nothing that doesn’t move. I’ve worked for organizations who’ve actually rented 40 foot ocean freight containers and stacked merchandise that wasn’t moving in there temporarily - eliminating employee parking in the dead of winter in the process.
So starting in early November customers start cleaning out ammo from store shelves. Stores make frantic calls their DCs, the DCs probably have a limited stock and NO orders in the pipeline. Everything goes on hold until after the After Christmas Sales. My guess is that merchants for big retailers, like Walmart, are just now placing panic orders to their vendors for ammo. What you probably got was 100 rounds of the first after holiday pallet that just trickled in to some Walmart DC in your area. Over the next few weeks the problem may (may) abate somewhat as the supply chain gets refilled.
The problem is, the manufacturers don’t want inventory in their warehouses anymore that the retailers do. Inventory is treated as an expense. Therefore, this time of year manufacturers probably slow down production until Spring so they probably don’t have a lot of product in stock to refill the retailers pipeline.
Now comes the tricky part. The merchants for the retailers don’t want to get stuck with a lot of ammo that people won’t buy for months if the panic abates and they don’t want to get stuck with a lot of ammo they can never sell if the Dems do some of the reactionary stuff they say they are going to do. So should the merchants load up their DCs and restock the store shelves or should they hang fire and let the clerks, at the bottom of the retail food chain, listen to the customers complain? This is the part that gets merchandising executives big bonuses or termination orders as the case may be.
As for the manufacturers, they’ve probably been caught flat footed too. Should they start churning out ammo, knowing that if the Dems do nothing there is going to be a glut of ammo on the market and they will have to discount their inventory in order to clear it - just as their organizations are getting use to the new fat margins? Or should they restrain production in order to save labor, warehousing, transportation and materiel costs and not build up any inventory just in case the Dems DO enact some reactionary laws like microstamping that could leave them with a lot of product they can never legally sell in the US and probably can’t export? And oh yea, there’s a recession going on.
My guess is that unless some brave entrepreneur starts bringing in (literally) boat loads of ammo from overseas and cutting into market share, Olin and CCI won’t be putting on any additional shifts and we won’t be seeing full shelves in retailer’s sporting goods departments anytime soon.
Because their supply chain is simpler the problem will probably effect online retailers and your local gun shop less than major chains.
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That’s great insight. Thanks for posting. It helps me see both sides of the picture. IMO, the Just-In-Time cycle will end up doing us a world of harm in national emergencies and crisis.