I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The whole idea behind free market enterprise is to charge what the market will bear. That is true for almost anything.
Cars, houses, clothes, food, fuel, etc.
EXCEPT when it comes to firearms and ammunition.
The manufactures follow that pricing guide however the secondary market, doesn't.
Secondary market being, private sellers, local dealers, pawn shops and others.
A firearm that I can purchase BRAND NEW from a chain store goes for much less than anywhere else.
Why? Well first off, the chain store has the opportunity to use volume discount, they are buying "X" number of firearms so they get them at a reduced amount. Your local dealer can't get that discount, they don't buy enough firearms yearly to make it worthwhile for the manufacturer to give them those discounts. Your local dealer also doesn't buy a minimum amount on a set time table.
Your local dealer orders a couple of firearms to have at least one or two in inventory at all times if they do that at all. I know of several dealers where they won't order a gun unless you want it custom ordered or they sell the only one they have in stock. Other dealers try to be more responsive to the desires of their customers and try to have 2 or 3 in stock at all times.
Two or three in stock versus 15 or 30 in stock. Guess who get a discount? Those chain stores might have 20-50 firearms in their stock, however they can sit on their stock if it doesn't sell. They can take a loss on it's price if they need to move it. They have other merchandise they can sell to make up for the lack of firearms sales. Many small dealers only have limited room and much more limited financial resources, so they cannot stock several thousand other items to try to make up for that firearm not selling.
Then there are pawn shops and private sellers.
Most pawn shops will get in a firearm on a loan and when they go to sell it, they will mark it up 150% or more. They do the same thing when they sell brand new firearms. Pricing them well over the MSRP of the firearm.
Case in point. Brand new Glock 17 4th Gen MSRP $549.00, is priced at 4 different pawnshops local to me from $650-$800. Nevermind that you can go to Academy Sports and get it for $499.00 or order it online for $519 if you don't want to pay sales tax.
Then there are private sellers.
Like the person who bought a Hi Point for $139 a few years back and decided he wanted to trick it out, now he wants to sell it. So he puts it on Gun Broker or Guns America for $225. And he TOTALLY thinks he should get $225 if not more for his gun. Why not? He DID Bubb.... Home Gunsm..... Uhh Radically modified it so it's TOTALLY worth it. It's so mall ninja'd that you and I aren't capable of understanding why his tricked out Hi Point is worth more than the GDP of Somalia and Eritrea COMBINED.
Uhhh No dude, you took a $139 dollar gun and tinkered with it, I don't know if you might have altered or damaged it's safety features or in your efforts to make it "Better" you actually made it unsafe. If anything, you'd be lucky if I gave you $100 for it.
Then there are the folks who have an old "Vintage" firearm, and just because it's VINTAGE, you need to pay more for it than a Brand new, NIB version of the same firearm. And I'll get to the people selling the H&R and IJ pocket revolvers for 3 times their bluebook value later.
Just beause something is old doesn't make it "Vintage" no matter how many times you write that word in the description on your auction. If you want to see "Vintage" firearms, go look at Forgotten Weapons Ian writes and does videos about TRUE Vintage firearms for a living. A 1970's model of a pistol that is still being manufactured is just a 1970's model of a currently manufactured pistol. If the firearm in question is no longer being manufactured, and there are few NOS parts available for it, THEN you are reaching "Vintage". PLUS!!!, just because YOU think your firearm is in EXCELLENT Condition according to the Bluebook, doesn't mean it actually IS.
I used to inspect, grade and appraise firearms, do you have any ideas just how much research is ACTUALLY involved in that? I didn't just look in a book and look at a firearm and say "Yup, 100% Excellent Condition" There are several sets of guidelines that have to be adhered to, HAVE TO BE, or else you are just wasting your time and trying to defraud your customer. And it wasn't just a book on the shelf I could reach for. Granted there were books, notice the plural, there were also phone numbers, (This being before the days of e-mail for everyone), there was also taking photos, getting them developed, (Yes film photos, we didn't have inexpensive digital cameras) sending copies of photos out with checks attached to various places, lots of request forms also with checks attached, and the minimum time for a full workup took about 3-5 weeks. One workup I did took almost 8 months as we had to get information from the Imperial War Museum in the UK.
So for you to think you can look up your firearm online or in a book and set a proper price based on that? You're deluding yourself.
And guess what? These checks, appraisals and inspections? They cost MONEY, sometimes LOTS of money. The one I referenced above, where we had to get info from the Imperial War Museum? The total fee for that appraisal was just under $390 in 1990's dollars, according to the Inflation Calculator, that's $731.52 in today's currency, not including any other price increases. IF the information is still even available. And sometimes the firearm isn't even WORTH that, so you have no way to recoup your investment.
And excuse me, but sentimental value does NOT add true value to a firearm. UNLESS the person who owned it was famous in someway. No famous person in it's ownership history? It's sentimental value + actual value is STILL only it's actual value. Your memories of your grandfather using the firearm to teach you to shoot with it are valuable. Only to you however, not to the rest of us.
My migraine is coming back, so I'm getting off for a bit.
The Replica Prop Forum
Very cool site I am also a member of
Showing posts with label Firearms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Firearms. Show all posts
Sunday, March 6, 2016
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Thoughts on Ammunition and Firearms costs volatility
I have a couple of new firearms that I have been wanting for a long time. One of the ones I wanted to get came into stock and sold out of stock so quickly, you would think it was shortly after Newtown and the pol's were talking about banning firearms again.
That lead me to think on just how volatile the markets actually are when it comes to firearms and ammunition.
Every time, a politician even mentions the possibility of a ban on either a firearm or ammunition, ALL firearms and ammunition, suddenly becomes hard to get if not almost impossible to get.
You have to think about that.
If someone wanted to try to game the markets, all they would have to do is to buy up a bunch of a particular firearm or ammunition, then start a rumor that there is a ban being proposed.
If you think that is far fetched,look at the availability of .22LR ammunition to this day.
Ammo speculators but up as much as they can and hoard it, letting it dribble out on Gun Broker and other similar sites, Artificially inflating the prices and limiting the availability of .22 LR ammo, because others who see those high prices, buy up all they can for themselves depressing the availability for everyone else.
Making the rarity of supply of .22 LR ammo a self fulfilling prophecy.
I was at my local Walmart the other day, and I saw the "Speculators" who I have seen before. These are the guys who would go from store to store to store buying all the .22 LR ammo before anyone else could, and then posting it for sale on an auction site.
Right now doing a quick check on AmmoSeek, the cheapest per round price of .22 LR ammo is .052 cents per round with a One Box limit. the next cheapest is .085 cents per round and that is for a specialty CB Cap round, not standard ammo. the next cheapest standard velocity ammo is .09 cents a round and again a One Box limit.
On Gunbroker.com, the LOWEST price per round on auctions that are close to completion is all over 11 cents per round. On buy it now only auctions, the lowest price per round I've found is over 12.3 cents per round. Add in Shipping and Handling, and the costs per round can easily exceed .18 cents per round.
This on an ammunition that most of us used to pay less than 1.3 cents per round on. And many years ago, I actually paid less than .05 cents per round. Yes, a half a cent per round. When I was a kid, I could buy a 100 round box of Remington or Winchester .22 LR ammo for right at a dollar a box. If I wanted to buy .22 Shorts, I could get a 50 round box of short's for as little as .25 cents a box. And I remember my uncle calling THAT highway robbery as he used to be able to buy .22 Shorts for .05 cents a box of 50.
There are some who say that it is the ammunition companies that are marking up their prices. I don't believe that is the problem. For the most part ammunition companies can only run so many lines of production before they HAVE to shut down for maintenance or changeover to another product/caliber. Many of the machines being used are decades old and they require proper maintenance, they require parts, and they require some time off to for their operators to get some rest themselves.
I don't know how many of my readers have ever worked on a production factory floor, but I have. For Contico Plastics and at an Onion Ring Plant. And even with a good maintenance department, the machinery NEEDS downtime beyond basic maintenance to destress the parts. Otherwise you start having larger numbers of and increased severity of breakdowns. It's just like your car or truck. You CANNOT have it run 24/7/365, it needs some downtime to cool down, have maintenance performed and have preventive maintenance done to head off problems.
Remember when I said above that a lot of the machinery used to manufacture ammunition is decades old? I know for a FACT that the Olin Plant in Alton, Illinois had and probably still does have machinery from the early 1900's on their production floor. Some of that stuff is pushing 100 years old, if not older. Would you like to try to find parts for those machines yourself? You probably can't. However Olin's Maintenance Department also has a good machine shop, and they make a lot those parts themselves. Or have them sent out to a custom machine shop if they can't do it themselves.
Many other ammunition producers WANT to increase their output. However they do NOT want to have to purchase new, very expensive equipment to do so, and then find themselves stuck with the interest payments on that new equipment after the market catches up.
Firearms manufacturers are in the same quandary. Do they spend millions of dollars on new mills, lathes and CNC equipments which costs upwards of a hundred thousand dollars, or do they do their best to try to keep up, without their quality dropping off and killing their market share?
And the speculators, remember them? The speculators are also in the firearms markets as well. There is a guy down in Corpus Christi, sitting on over 200 80% AR-15 receivers, and when I last saw, he had dozens of unopened boxes containing nothing but AR-15 Magazines. And he keeps buying more and more. He had more ammo in his garage, mostly 5.56 and 5.45, than I saw in the back room at Gander Mountain in College Station. He WANTS Congress to try to ban stuff again, so he can try to make back his money.
Once again, remember those old machines? And how a lot of them need parts custom made for them? How do you think those parts are paid for? How do you think the people working on those machines are paid for? What about the operators of those machines?
Through SALES of their product.
The manufacturer's don't WANT congress to try to ban their products, they don't want state or local governments to do it either. They want their product to be available to whoever can legally own it at a price they can afford to pay for them.
That way, the manufacturers can sell you more of their product down the road, for your kids and grandkids to enjoy.
There was a video by a YouTuber who said that everyone needed to stop buying ammo and AR-15's, because they were driving up the prices so HE couldn't buy them himself. Kind of shot sighted and narcissistic of him, isn't it?
So remember this, the current volatility isn't the manufacturers trying to get more money, even though many of them have had their costs of materials rise, which needs to be added in to the cost we pay, the volatility is the DEMAND, which so far has been outstripping the supply.
Granted also that when the M855 ban was being floated there WAS quite a bit of price gouging by certain distributors. However it wasn't really as bad as some people make it out to have been. Yes the cost for all 5.56 ammo has risen and supplies have gotten scarce, but the market is starting to come back down. It was NOT the manufacturer's who did that though. They know where their bread is buttered, and they would much rather have loyal customers for life than annoyed customers for right this minute. Loyal customers will always come back to buy their product, annoyed customers will take their money elsewhere.
And it only take one bad customer review to cost a company untold amounts of money. So the good manufacturer's will do whatever they can that is reasonable to keep their customer base, and to keep them happy.
I have written e-mail to Remington, Winchester, and a few other manufacturers asking them if they would be willing to comment on this. I'll update as it comes through.
The response from Vista Outdoor (ATK - Speer) -
" Thank you for your inquiry.
The current market and environment is causing stronger than usual demand for products in our industry. The current increase in demand is attributed to the civilian market. Our facilities operate 24-hours a day. We are continually making process improvements to increase our efficiency and investing in capital and personnel where we have sustained demand. We are bringing additional capacity online again this year.
If you'd like further comment on the topic, Mike Bazinet at the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) is providing insight from an industry perspective. He can be reached at -------@------------ or ***-***-****
We wish you the best with your blog.
Appreciatively,
Vista Outdoor Communications Team"
I have sent Mr. Bazinet an e-mail, and have received notices of my messages to other companies being forwarded to their PR departments. As more replies come in I will up date this post.
That lead me to think on just how volatile the markets actually are when it comes to firearms and ammunition.
Every time, a politician even mentions the possibility of a ban on either a firearm or ammunition, ALL firearms and ammunition, suddenly becomes hard to get if not almost impossible to get.
You have to think about that.
If someone wanted to try to game the markets, all they would have to do is to buy up a bunch of a particular firearm or ammunition, then start a rumor that there is a ban being proposed.
If you think that is far fetched,look at the availability of .22LR ammunition to this day.
Ammo speculators but up as much as they can and hoard it, letting it dribble out on Gun Broker and other similar sites, Artificially inflating the prices and limiting the availability of .22 LR ammo, because others who see those high prices, buy up all they can for themselves depressing the availability for everyone else.
Making the rarity of supply of .22 LR ammo a self fulfilling prophecy.
I was at my local Walmart the other day, and I saw the "Speculators" who I have seen before. These are the guys who would go from store to store to store buying all the .22 LR ammo before anyone else could, and then posting it for sale on an auction site.
Right now doing a quick check on AmmoSeek, the cheapest per round price of .22 LR ammo is .052 cents per round with a One Box limit. the next cheapest is .085 cents per round and that is for a specialty CB Cap round, not standard ammo. the next cheapest standard velocity ammo is .09 cents a round and again a One Box limit.
On Gunbroker.com, the LOWEST price per round on auctions that are close to completion is all over 11 cents per round. On buy it now only auctions, the lowest price per round I've found is over 12.3 cents per round. Add in Shipping and Handling, and the costs per round can easily exceed .18 cents per round.
This on an ammunition that most of us used to pay less than 1.3 cents per round on. And many years ago, I actually paid less than .05 cents per round. Yes, a half a cent per round. When I was a kid, I could buy a 100 round box of Remington or Winchester .22 LR ammo for right at a dollar a box. If I wanted to buy .22 Shorts, I could get a 50 round box of short's for as little as .25 cents a box. And I remember my uncle calling THAT highway robbery as he used to be able to buy .22 Shorts for .05 cents a box of 50.
There are some who say that it is the ammunition companies that are marking up their prices. I don't believe that is the problem. For the most part ammunition companies can only run so many lines of production before they HAVE to shut down for maintenance or changeover to another product/caliber. Many of the machines being used are decades old and they require proper maintenance, they require parts, and they require some time off to for their operators to get some rest themselves.
I don't know how many of my readers have ever worked on a production factory floor, but I have. For Contico Plastics and at an Onion Ring Plant. And even with a good maintenance department, the machinery NEEDS downtime beyond basic maintenance to destress the parts. Otherwise you start having larger numbers of and increased severity of breakdowns. It's just like your car or truck. You CANNOT have it run 24/7/365, it needs some downtime to cool down, have maintenance performed and have preventive maintenance done to head off problems.
Remember when I said above that a lot of the machinery used to manufacture ammunition is decades old? I know for a FACT that the Olin Plant in Alton, Illinois had and probably still does have machinery from the early 1900's on their production floor. Some of that stuff is pushing 100 years old, if not older. Would you like to try to find parts for those machines yourself? You probably can't. However Olin's Maintenance Department also has a good machine shop, and they make a lot those parts themselves. Or have them sent out to a custom machine shop if they can't do it themselves.
Many other ammunition producers WANT to increase their output. However they do NOT want to have to purchase new, very expensive equipment to do so, and then find themselves stuck with the interest payments on that new equipment after the market catches up.
Firearms manufacturers are in the same quandary. Do they spend millions of dollars on new mills, lathes and CNC equipments which costs upwards of a hundred thousand dollars, or do they do their best to try to keep up, without their quality dropping off and killing their market share?
And the speculators, remember them? The speculators are also in the firearms markets as well. There is a guy down in Corpus Christi, sitting on over 200 80% AR-15 receivers, and when I last saw, he had dozens of unopened boxes containing nothing but AR-15 Magazines. And he keeps buying more and more. He had more ammo in his garage, mostly 5.56 and 5.45, than I saw in the back room at Gander Mountain in College Station. He WANTS Congress to try to ban stuff again, so he can try to make back his money.
Once again, remember those old machines? And how a lot of them need parts custom made for them? How do you think those parts are paid for? How do you think the people working on those machines are paid for? What about the operators of those machines?
Through SALES of their product.
The manufacturer's don't WANT congress to try to ban their products, they don't want state or local governments to do it either. They want their product to be available to whoever can legally own it at a price they can afford to pay for them.
That way, the manufacturers can sell you more of their product down the road, for your kids and grandkids to enjoy.
There was a video by a YouTuber who said that everyone needed to stop buying ammo and AR-15's, because they were driving up the prices so HE couldn't buy them himself. Kind of shot sighted and narcissistic of him, isn't it?
So remember this, the current volatility isn't the manufacturers trying to get more money, even though many of them have had their costs of materials rise, which needs to be added in to the cost we pay, the volatility is the DEMAND, which so far has been outstripping the supply.
Granted also that when the M855 ban was being floated there WAS quite a bit of price gouging by certain distributors. However it wasn't really as bad as some people make it out to have been. Yes the cost for all 5.56 ammo has risen and supplies have gotten scarce, but the market is starting to come back down. It was NOT the manufacturer's who did that though. They know where their bread is buttered, and they would much rather have loyal customers for life than annoyed customers for right this minute. Loyal customers will always come back to buy their product, annoyed customers will take their money elsewhere.
And it only take one bad customer review to cost a company untold amounts of money. So the good manufacturer's will do whatever they can that is reasonable to keep their customer base, and to keep them happy.
I have written e-mail to Remington, Winchester, and a few other manufacturers asking them if they would be willing to comment on this. I'll update as it comes through.
The response from Vista Outdoor (ATK - Speer) -
" Thank you for your inquiry.
The current market and environment is causing stronger than usual demand for products in our industry. The current increase in demand is attributed to the civilian market. Our facilities operate 24-hours a day. We are continually making process improvements to increase our efficiency and investing in capital and personnel where we have sustained demand. We are bringing additional capacity online again this year.
If you'd like further comment on the topic, Mike Bazinet at the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) is providing insight from an industry perspective. He can be reached at -------@------------ or ***-***-****
We wish you the best with your blog.
Appreciatively,
Vista Outdoor Communications Team"
I have sent Mr. Bazinet an e-mail, and have received notices of my messages to other companies being forwarded to their PR departments. As more replies come in I will up date this post.
Monday, October 13, 2014
Metallurgy in Firearms
I posted several months back about Firearms History, Technology & Development, and that I had added it to my Blogroll and to the Gun Blog Black Lis.t. There are currently on the top 2 pages ten posts about the metals used in firearms manufacture.
Such as in Part 10 about how iron ore has been turned into Iron, used in the manufacture of firearms and other things.
"In the Walloon process, the finery forge is used to melt the iron as described above and then it is hammered to remove the slag. Then the iron is heated again in a separate chafery forge, not to melting temperature, but just enough to make the iron soft, so that it can be shaped into bars of standard sizes. The bars of iron can now be sold to customers. The finery forge must use charcoal as its fuel, for the reasons explained above in the previous paragraph, but the chafery forge can use other fuels such as coal or gas as well, because it does not heat the iron enough to melt it and therefore cannot add impurities to the alloy. Typically, the Walloon process would use one chafery for every two or three finery forges."
So click on either the excerpt above to read Part 10 Orrrrrr click on the following link to get directly to the front page:Firearms History, Technology & Development
Such as in Part 10 about how iron ore has been turned into Iron, used in the manufacture of firearms and other things.
"In the Walloon process, the finery forge is used to melt the iron as described above and then it is hammered to remove the slag. Then the iron is heated again in a separate chafery forge, not to melting temperature, but just enough to make the iron soft, so that it can be shaped into bars of standard sizes. The bars of iron can now be sold to customers. The finery forge must use charcoal as its fuel, for the reasons explained above in the previous paragraph, but the chafery forge can use other fuels such as coal or gas as well, because it does not heat the iron enough to melt it and therefore cannot add impurities to the alloy. Typically, the Walloon process would use one chafery for every two or three finery forges."
So click on either the excerpt above to read Part 10 Orrrrrr click on the following link to get directly to the front page:Firearms History, Technology & Development
Friday, July 12, 2013
Not sure if spam, scam or what
I received an e-mail earlier from a young lady hawking a supposed "New" website for the comparing of firearms. After some back and forth e-mails I found out from her that the site is "Associated" with Gander Mountain and being run by Kevin O'Connor, whose Wikipedia page states that he is the co-founder of DoubleClick the ad service company that puts ads all over the web. I was asked for a blurb about the new site by the young lady and it was a little off putting. The first e-mail I received was plain jane no signature lines or anything like that and as I asked more detailed question the "Professionalness" I guess you could say of her messages increased in relation to the more detailed my questions became. Anyway I'm posting the screen shots of our conversation here and you my readers can decide for yourself.
I personally am of the opinion that this is nothing more than a way to capitalize on the 2nd Amendment, especially with Illinois now being Shall Issue. And while I think a search engine for firearms is good, there are other websites out there that do similar functions that DON'T have a tie in with a major company.
But that's just me. I was suspicious of Heidi from Lucky Gunner until she actually followed through with what she said, so this may just be my built in suspicion talking.
I personally am of the opinion that this is nothing more than a way to capitalize on the 2nd Amendment, especially with Illinois now being Shall Issue. And while I think a search engine for firearms is good, there are other websites out there that do similar functions that DON'T have a tie in with a major company.
But that's just me. I was suspicious of Heidi from Lucky Gunner until she actually followed through with what she said, so this may just be my built in suspicion talking.
Friday, May 24, 2013
Illinois Judge arrested for Heroin and firearms possession
Monday, January 21, 2013
Buying firearms with foodstamps?
"Undercover law enforcement agents caught the defendants illegally trading cash for food stamp benefits and buying and selling products that are ineligible through the program, such as counterfeit clothing and firearms."
There is your problem Mr. President....
Rampant fraud and abuse that your Department of Justice ISN'T stopping.
There is your problem Mr. President....
Rampant fraud and abuse that your Department of Justice ISN'T stopping.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
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