Lets protest the winchester plant closing

the winchester closing will not have anything to do w/ wally world ammo. OLIN/ Winchester is another company completly.
a point was made in the form of a question
"how many Winchester 94s are in your gun safe?"
that is my initial point in this thread. How many do you need?
how many will the average person buy?
building a great gun is not enough to stay in buisness. look at what weatherby did. they subed out some crappy howa rifles, slapped weatherby on them and sold them at walmart. ill bet the stockholders are doing backflips. Remington keeps pushing out junk as well 710's SPR's. price points and pallat sales. keep the hordes happy w/ sub quality and youll stay in buisness.
rifleman scopes? ill be leupold sold more VX1 and rifleman scopes last deer season than the rest of the lines combined.
if you dont then you will fade into obscurity at best and vanish completly at worste.
Winchester was 175 years old! they wont be the last to buckle under.
whats Browning doing? running scared cause they are next. they better put out a bull BBL 308 or a pistol gripped BAR or something. wooooooooooo you made the BLR in 450 marlin, yeah, thatll do it.
Browning should put out a 1911. get some of the market. crap S&W and Sig have a 1911. how about a browning tactical shotgun. something.
 
Glenn E. Meyer,

Labor unions didn't cause me not to buy a Winchester. The reason I haven't picked up a Winchester yet was due to other items on my list having priority. Labor unions caused the closure of the plant.

My point was that a free market economy will fill the void left by the Winchester closure with what customers want.
 
Obliquely on topic at best, but the more I poke around with the history of the S&W / Clinton / HUD boycott the less convinced I am that the buying public really has the strokes we pat ourselves on the back about.

The agreement required a pile of stipulations on retail FFL's. At least locally, that meant at least three of the larger retailers dropped the line like a hot rock.

In other words, any success the boycott may have had was associated less with "sportsmen" and more with dealers pulling the plug.

Sorry if the above is off base: I admit to not paying attention back then. However, subsequent poking about has provided me with a disconnect on the "grassroots retail purchaser" nature of the beast. Granted, a lot of buyers were boycotting S&W but it's a lot easier to avoid temptation when your dealer has chunked the line overboard.
 
Labor costs probably had very little do with it. To a company like FN/Herstal the cost of 188 employees was probably chump change. Hunting rifles seemed to have slumped in sales over the past few years. They seemed to be devoting a large part of the market to the WSM and WSSM rifles. In my part of the country Bubba is sometime reluctant to accept new things such as new calibers. I wonder if this palyed a part in the closing.
 
Why couldn't you mobilize this the day the closing was announced? I might have that 94 right now after all.

Hrmph.
 
To a company like FN/Herstal the cost of 188 employees was probably chump change.
Click to expand...
Could FN support them indefinitely? Sure.
Were those workers productive? No, people were not buying what was made at that factory.
So they are over paid, even thought they are willing to do more work.
Does this drain show up on the bottomline? Of course. In fact, because of union contracts, this black hole was even larger, bringing it to the attention of more managers and stock holders.
This was an old factory that would have been expensive to upgrade and no market to upgrade for.

Unions have their place and have done much for safer working conditions. But I have seen too many strikes demanding raises and increased benefits when the company they were working for was headed down the tubes. More money today, no job tomorrow, industry leaving the day after that. Good thinking.
 
It is true that people often buy on price. That is why, although we bitch about it, we see flimsier items that are not made to last on the market (in general, no just guns).
To deliver that, workers that are not in productive situations must be moved or fired. This is a general buisness reality.

It isn't just a question of if you are willing to pay more for better quality, the question is if there is a large enough market of people willing to do so.
 
I promise to not buy a single newly made Winchester rifle for as long as there are no newly made Winchester rifles to buy.


This goes along with my refusal to fly Pan Am as long as they continue to not offer flights, and my stubborn boycott of all unavailable new Oldsmobile products.
 
Bigger boycott

I say boycott the companies that out source our jobs, kill pensions and benefits. Let's boycott "leaders" that are shutting down this country, Winchester is just a small portion of what we losing. Don't kill it after it's dead. Maybe all the gun forums could ante up a bid for it start it back up, put some Americans back to work. Things like that have to happen. A Boycott on " box mart" would be more beneficial. China is known for their junk, we need to known for quality once again.
 
Was known for their junk. If you want to hold on to old conceptions, you will lose every time. Which is not to say low cost, low quality goods aren't made in China, but that is what is asked for in those contracts.

An old factory in serious need of refurbishing needing new equiptment and tooling? Right now they are only geared to make things not in demand. Like the American auto industry, they need(ed) designs that people want to buy.
I'm guessing it would be cheaper to buy the rights to the name (and better known designs) and otherwise start from scratch.
Then you need gun designers and testing facilities, because without those new designs that will be in demand, it is dead in the water.
How many millions do you think this is? How many websites can put together a bid, or at least a reasonable buisness plan to get the loan that big?

Had Winchester not been owned by a company with big pockets, it would have closed earlier. Any plan to buy needs to include a plan to make it a viable company. Creating jobs is nice, keeping them is better.
 
There are examples of renowned brand names which have slipped into obscurity. One comes to mind, because of its high profile name recognition at the time of the closing of it's manufacturer, the value was over estimated. Several years passed before the owners were able to transfer ownership, there was never a resurgence and the brand has all but died.

The brand name was "Keen Kutter". I would guess most people on this forum has never heard of this brand of tools and cutlery. The prominence of the brand between 1890 and 1950 was on par with Winchester. In fact Winchester Repeating Arms Company purchased the manufacturer/distributor of Keen Kutter (Simmons Hardware Company) in 1922. This "merger" created The Winchester-Simmons Company. By 1930 The Winchester-Simmons Company was very close completely going out of business. The Simmons and Winchester companies were split. Winchester manufactured only firearms related products. A good plan and good leadership saved Winchester. For a number of reasons Keen Kutter had some difficulties. Keen Kutter went completely out of production in 1960 for several years. When the trademark was finally sold the recognition had diminished, there was never a resurgence.

The point is we all have 75+ years of Winchester we easily may not have had without the leadership of Kidder Peabody and others. If the owners of the Winchester trademark make a good plan we may get another 75 years.
 
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