Assuming Vista allows the prices to drop that low.Originally Posted by WDR
They control so much of the market and have really become more of a mega corporation nowadays.
That means they'll do mega corporation shit. Methinks some attempts at price fixing are to follow.
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I feel the same way about things. Winchester was already priced higher than Vista brands before, and I'm not sure that Winchester has much incentive to try to undercut Vista on pricing now.
The current admin cutting off Russian steel case imports also won't help push prices downward. I honestly don't care for that stuff, and screw sending money to Russia if we can avoid it right now... but they did help drive domestic prices down. If they start screwing with other imports, that won't help things either, but I think it's more about hurting Russia than hurting US shooters, so I think it's unlikely.
The super tight primer and powder supply bothers me too. Especially primers. Last go around, we got a bunch of primers from Russia... that seems unlikely these days.
I just used up the last of my Russian primers from the last debacle. But I have more CCI and Win, lots more. If for no other reason inflation is a good reason to have a good supply of ammo or components. Now we have inflation along with Covid.
In the P-F basket of deplorables.
I see a problem going forward for the civilian ammo market.
The Lake city plant is owned by the military and produces most of their small arms ammo. So they could be totally out of the picture for civilian ammo production if the plant management decided the production should all go to the military. LC ammo was available to dealers for awhile before the craziness started. My shooting buddy used to buy it by the case locally. At that time the plant was managed by Federal. I think that supply went away but not sure as I don't buy ammo.
The Remington operation is owned by Vista now who also owns Alliant Powder, Federal, CCI and Speer.
Winchester, Federal and LC are the three large ammo manufacturers in the US. As the LC plant is managed by Winchester now the price of ammo will be set by those two companies. They don't have any competition.
In the P-F basket of deplorables.
Unless we can get S&B and a few of those eastern European ammo companies to blast the market with cheaper stuff and make a killing off of it.
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Norma has been doing just that.
I used to see a lot of Serbian PPU (5.56 NATO) at the range. I don't think it has been banned but with shipping costs it's probably a lot more expensive these days.
In the P-F basket of deplorables.
Exactly. Last case I bought from them was $299 with free shipping. Clean, and good shooting. I preferred the days of $8.99 / 50 of S&B 124, which is still above my reload cost. Sometimes it's about convenience and not wanting to press out ammo. Besides, if I'm buying factory, I'm hedging my bets by not consuming my stock.
As the pricing and availability of components weighs on my mind, the replacement cost factors in.
Taking a break from social media.
And isn't most commercial ammo sold through distribution channels and this bypasses them as well? Direct sales at peak market cost, and as much as we bitch, some people I bet do it. Smart or not, there are probably Cost Is No Object people that jumped on it.
But you know, the only problem with the program is the shyster pricing. If they had come out with this program at more like $390/k (that they could do by circumventing distributors and retailers) rather than $560/k, they would look like good guys and many of us would sign right up. Maybe that was the original idea, I have sat through meetings like that in the past, where a good idea turns into a shitty one but still gets launched.
It happened to me with shot. When I started reloading for trap, shot was about $1/lb. When it hit $2/lb factory ammo cost about the same as a reloaded shell. When our club purchased several pallets of ammo it became cheaper than reloading. So you really have to like cleaning up shot and powder just to save a few cents to reload. Somebody got a really good deal on two MEC presses.
So far with metallic reloading I'm still ahead of the game by reloading but that could all change.
In the P-F basket of deplorables.
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