This is true. I see a lot of comments that turn this into a philosophical debate but not enough actionable talk. Earlier this summer I wanted to buy a graphics card, so I spent weeks following discord "drop" servers where people were running scripts checking inventories of every online store and sending out alerts as soon as, say, Best Buy restocks Nvidia cards. Naturally these would sell out instantly and/or websites would crash from thousands of gamers/miners/scalpers ALL trying to buy something at once.

During this experience I had the morbid thought that we're only a a natural/human disaster away from having to do the same for more necessary things. Get familiar with web scraping or buying communities of things you need while you can.

It seems like ammo has been in experiencing semi-perpetual issues for the past 12+ years

That’s not unfair. The biggest “real” one I can think of was Sandy Hook, the biggest “fake” (consumer caused and perpetuated) was the 2016 election, after Trump won, 22lr ammo was impossible to find. Gun store talk is always bad (said as a gun guy that doesn’t like gun store bullshit) but this was on a whole different level.

This latest… similar, but worse obviously. At least there is a real world event tied to it.

It’s coming down, but I feel like between inflation and commodity prices we aren’t going to see pre-panic prices ever again. Extremely skeptical I’ll be able to get 1k of 9mm delivered to my door under $250 going forward let alone the previous $160.

It’s a larger condition that there is distrust of government, the spread of bullshit at light speeds, diminishing personal freedoms, and a media cheering it all on. So I get why people are hording bullets a bit, but it’s funny that actual good defensive ammo isn’t more sought after. Just the cheap training stuff.

Ammo is weird because you have the government and consumer markets. We only see shortages for consumers.

High prices and a larger market should attract increased manufacturing capacity.

Could be interesting for a new highly automated robotic factory to bring down costs?

Ammo is a government first market, not a parallel market.

Factories generally have to fill their government orders first, then sell govt runs 2nds/rejects (in military calibers) to consumers, and then manufacture consumer specific rounds with surplus factory capacity.

Automation at factories to this point has generally resulted in lower quality products. People still want it because it's cheap, but there's a balance between price and how bad of a product people will tolerate.

As far as automation and larger throughput, the machine exist, but at the scale of the market under normal conditions, it doesn’t make sense to plan on panics. At least it didn’t traditionally.

If Federal or Sellier invest in a n% more machines now, they will be a year or two out, and who knows what the market will look like then? Under Trump, the market was fairly slow and these companies would have had too much capacity for their sales.

Normally, I’m told the ammo companies like to plan perfectly filling one shift. Then on panics being able to run 3 shifts a day (which they all are now). Being set up to run your 10 big machines for 24hr at a time is a better plan than 30 machines and 20 normally sitting idle, because in the scenario you COULD run 30 machines at 24hr, you are going to run out of components anyhow.

That is another issue, it isn’t the assembly that is the ultimate bottleneck, almost powder comes out of maybe four places in the world, same for primers. Right now as I understand, it’s really a primer shortage, but no on is sitting on mountains of spare powder either.

I’ve had 20k primers carved out on order of 200k for 9 months now. I don’t expect to see them anytime soon.