xcalibor67,
A lot of online places are constantly filling back orders and aren't getting caught up, so what they receive never goes far enough to appear as being in stock, even though they have flow-through.
One problem people have is not realizing just how big the U.S. small arms ammunition market is. Currently around 18 billion rounds a year, if what I've read is correct. Over ten times what government normally consumes. But even though that number is huge, it's still only about 55 rounds for every person in the country, or 220 rounds per family of four per year. So you can see how, if every family that goes through a brick of .22's a year got concerned and bought two bricks instead of one, it would cut into the supply availability because it doubled demand.
I took a managerial accounting class in college and can tell you that not investing any more in production capacity than is absolutely necessary to meet demand is a constant concern. If you can't count on a return on that investment, you're not only paying interest on loans for things you don't need, you are giving up the chance of using the money to earn money elsewhere (opportunity cost), so you lose twice. As a result, you can bet that when this mess started there wasn't much excess capacity on line. Adding a shift was previously downtime is about all that could be done. That increases cost because it's usually done first with overtime, which reduces profit off the equipment needed to maintain or replace it if you don't raise prices, so many have done just that. But even adding an extra shift of new employees doesn't help when no increase in raw materials is in the pipeline. That takes several months to overcome, assuming the raw materials suppliers have what you need and can sell it to you. Raw materials have become a big bottleneck. It's a mess.
