This shortage will be with us for a while. I was in a meeting today about shipping commercial refrigeration equipment and was told the cost of shipping overseas has gone up about $5K per container. What cost $8K to ship across the Atlantic at the start of the year was now $13K. Additionally, when you get scheduled to ship, it is getting common to truck the container to the port and be told you'd been bumped due to overbooking, and that your container will have to sit in the yard for a month waiting for the next ship. Then that next ship arrives two weeks late, so it's actually a month and a half in the yard. This is going on worldwide and has a lot to do with why overseas supplies like gunpowder and primers and even loaded ammunition are only dribbling in. On the domestic side, it also took that same supplier three weeks to get a shipment from Pittsburgh to Denver. There is a shortage of truck space and trucking costs are increasing 10% some weeks. You used to be able to schedule a truck pickup for a specific day, but now it can be a three day window. That affects everything we buy.
The lack of supply pipeline space means undersupply and the resulting buyer competition may get worse. In ammunition and loading components in particular, we also have the new demand from all the new first-time gun owners, which were about 8.4 million by the end of last year buying at a pace that puts that number north of 10 Million by now, adding to demand for the underserved ammunition market that the old supply lines, even when they were running at normal speed, were not sized to handle.
Inflationary pressures are going to get worse after all the bailout spending and general prices going up this summer should be expected. It is hard to see reloading supplies and ammunition returning to normal under these circumstances. Today, Midway had IMI M855 that somehow arrived at their warehouse and they want $0.83⅓/round. Yikes! And that price is the same for a 30-round box or a 1200-round box.
Reloadron said:
OK, then scratch Remington. I knew Vista Outdoors as of mid November "Currently the company employs more than 400 at the Remington plant in Lonoke, Arkansas with plans to bring back 300 furloughed workers as soon as possible" So till that ammunition plant is fully up and running, producing primers, make that three manufacturers in the US.
Remington is running and making primers.
This video from mid-December includes mention of Remington being in production. But it is more of interest because Vanderbrink is clearly exasperated with the conspiracy theorists claiming they aren't making and shipping ammunition when they are actually making more per day than they ever have in their history and are shipping it as fast as they can get it on a truck (which, as I pointed out above, can now actually be difficult to schedule when you want it).