Free For All Friday 1-30-2015: .22LR and other guns
I am sitting on a huge backlog of stuff to get to. I hate getting behind on work. If you’ve sent me an email in the past week/week and a half and I haven’t replied, I’m not ignoring you. Real life is just being real life and, well, yeah. We’ve got two questions this week, one from THE Chris H. who occasionally writes for the blog!
Why on earth is .22 ammo still so hard to find? -Our Very Own Chris H.
Remember when you could get, like, 500+ rounds of .22LR for around $15 at any given point? Heck, stores had so much that they could do buy-one get-one boxes and still not run out. These days, even though the vast majority of ammo has returned to the shelves in bountiful and (more importantly) affordable amounts, the .22LR sections of the ammo aisles are still a bit sparse…to say the least. What gives?
Part of it, as Lawrence on the Facebook page pointed out, is due to people buying a bunch of with the hopes of reselling it. There is also a not-insignificant number of people who are just hoarding the heck out of it in the fear that there will be another huge shortage at some point. The problem is, those people alone can’t really account for the massive void we’re seeing at the moment.
For starters, we need to consider why .22LR was so cheap to begin with. The primary reason was because there was a metric buttload of it around. Now, that’s a metric buttload which, if you want to run the conversion is a little over 3 times an imperial buttload. Not only was there a huge surplus but the production levels were still at the same levels even though there were piles of it in warehouses. Supply and demand rules always apply so when you have a huge supply and the demand stays the same, the price will always drop. It’s the primary reason why .22LR was popular in the first place: they’re just freaking cheap.
Then the scare hit. People, in their panic, burned through store’s inventories then they burned through what should have been a couple of year’s worth of surplus in a matter of months. They didn’t just burn through .22LR, mind you, they burned through all of it. Every caliber there was got consumed by the panicked masses. Demand outpaced supply. Everything got turned on its nose. So there’s where the initial void came from. But what about the void that has remained?
Let’s take emotion and personal preference out of the equation for a moment put yourself in the shoes of a manufacturer. Having a business is pointless if your goal isn’t to stay in business, right? Even though the machines are different, the raw materials and human resources needed to produce ammo is in a finite pool. If your entire inventory is depleted, where do you dedicate the majority of those production resources? Do you put them into the most popular round on the worldwide market (9mm)? Do you put it into the the round with the most profit margin (.40 or .45)? Or do you put your resources into the round that, while popular, is surprisingly expensive to make per round and only nets you a fraction of a penny per round sold?
The reason why .22LR is still not to where it was is because that’s what the market has deemed it to be. Manufacturers are producing at max capacity and the glut of excess inventory isn’t there. One other factor to keep in mind is that the number of gun owners has skyrocketed over the past few years. The manufacturers are producing at a capacity geared towards the industry a few years ago. We’re going to have doubled the amount of gun owners in the country at some point in the near future. So at the same time that manufacturers are running at maximum capacity, they’re also trying to increase their capacity to keep up with the market.
It’s a risky game to play, however. You don’t want to misjudge your market then start producing far more than are needed because, at that point, the prices go down and you start to lose money. Now, before people start screaming “See?! They’re purposely keeping production down to keep prices up!”, remember what I said earlier. Businesses need to stay in business and they don’t want to kill themselves. They’re going to continue production at a rate that keeps them competitive with other ammo manufacturers. There will always been those that sell stuff cheaper and others that sell stuff at a premium.
You often hear names like Ruger, Smith & Wesson, Taurus on firearm forums but not H&K or Sig Sauer as much. Why is that? -Gordon L.
Great question and you can bet that the marketing departments at SIG and H&K spend 40+ hours a week pondering the same thing. As an outsider, I have my own theory. Let me just say up front: I’m going to have to tread lightly here. You’ll understand why in a moment.
If you look at the price points of Ruger, S&W, Taurus, Glock and similar lines, they weigh in at a price tag below $600 for the most part. With companies like SIG, H&K and other “premium” pistols, they usually start at $600. This means that those premium brands are just naturally going to have a smaller market share to begin with. I don’t have any numbers that I can find but I’d hazard a guess to say you’ll probably come across 5-10 Glock owners for every one H&K owner. This is because, even for those with the money to do so, it’s FAR easier to justify $450-$550 on a Glock than it is on a $950 H&K. It’s a numbers game there and it can make it appear as though guns like H&K and SIG just aren’t popular but you really are comparing apples to oranges.
Let’s look at it another way. Is it fair to compare the Toyota Camry to the BMW 428i? Both are 4-cylinder sedans with around 34 mpg. The Camry, however, outsells the BMW by huge margins. Going down the highway you’re more likely to see a Camry than a 428i. If you look purely at the numbers, one could say that the BMW just isn’t a popular car. However, if you compare the numbers to say Mercedes and Audi, you’d see that the 428i is actually hugely popular among that segment.
So the reason you’re not seeing much about SIG and H&K on forums (and I apologize because I can’t figure out a way to say this that doesn’t sound jerky to me) is that the people on the forums you’re visiting just aren’t SIG or H&K people.
Thanks for the questions!
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