No way to tell where primer pricing will go. It looks bad now, but we are still in the situation where supply is short and people want to over-buy whenever they find a supply and if the merchant will let them. A TV economist says this applies to any commodity that has a shortage. Toilet paper, for example, got over-bought at any price when the pandemic started. A friend of mine says his neighbor grabbed the stuff like it would never be available again and didn't stop until he took inventory and realized he had accumulated a four-year supply in his garage. So it isn't until, first, supply becomes adequate AND after the over-buyers saturate themselves that it stops being a seller's market. Only then can you expect prices to start to find their new normal.
One of Adam Smith's basic concepts is that in a competitive environment,
prices tend toward the cost of production. Right now, there is no competitive environment because it is a seller's market, with demand exceeding supply. As discussed in several previous threads, interviews with the presidents of the major brand companies running the factories show they have all added personnel and are operating 24/7, but demand still can't be met. It can take several years to get new plant capacity fully in place and running, so this will take a while to resolve. It seems to me that in 2012 it took like 18 months for CCI to bring two more primer lines up, but I assume that was on land already zoned for their existing facilities. There are places where it can take that long just to get building permits for a safe activity. Businesses working with environmentally sensitive materials can take longer to get permitted. In addition, there was hesitancy in 2020 about putting plans to expand plant facilities into action because the industry had geared up to supply a high volume market two administrations back, then got stuck holding the bag when the last administration came in and gun owners stopped fear-driven buying.
Primers are going to take an especially long time to come back because not only are primer makers giving priority to supplying primers for their loaded ammunition manufacturing (where they have the most facility investment to recoup and employees to keep paid as well as profit to be made), but some newer players,
like Ammo Inc, have got previously-planned finished ammunition facilities coming online this year, and they don't make primers. So they will be competing with us to buy primers, too, and you can bet that will make primers even more scarce than they are now, for a time. Finished ammo will continue to get almost all the available primers for at least another couple of years, I expect.
All this is due to normal free market forces at work. About the only thing "commies" or other anti-private-gun-ownership forces have to do with it is helping perpetuate the seller's market by panicking people into buying whatever they can whenever they can. About the only ray of hope I see in the mess is that Winchester's president made it clear he believes the new first-time gun buyers and the big surge in hunting represent a permanent market increase. That means there is now a willingness to invest in new facilities that was absent in 2020 and that will eventually result in catching up the supply chain. Just don't expect it to be fast, given the long lead times for building new facilities. These are currently being made even longer by the steel supply chain problems in the pandemic.
It's just a perfect storm.
500 69gr smk's cost as much as 500 168gr smk's did .