Faced with bare shelves, My (small) LGS decided to expand his busisness to stay afloat. He now does mechanic work in addition to gun sales.
I think some people forget that one of the limitations smaller stores carry is a limited stock. Yes, there has been an immense level of panic buying, and some stores may have indeed made a years worth of profits. And then there are others to gripe and whine that the shop should have stayed in business or jacked prices... Lets' look at this another way.
Mr Mom & pop gunstore LLC in an average year carries $50,000 worth of merchandise in their store at any one point in time. They average $200,000 worth of sales a year. They have good credit, and so they carry $100,000 worth of credit available at any one point in time. Now along comes big bad Oogabooga with his gun control program and we get a panic attack by the collective public. with me so far?
The store owner is abreast of current events and preps his credit line to order evil black rifles and ammo. However, every other big box store and LGS across the country is doing pretty much the same thing. Mr BIG box distributor works with 500 stores. He has enough ammo and black guns in the warehouse to supply each of them with one gun and one box of ammo if they all call at once. Is he going to do that? frack no that's a stupid business model, he'll get killed in the shipping and handling costs, and will likely loose some of his stores in protest. So he sends out the orders in a first come, first serve basis. only store #3 orders every gun he has in stock. Dang, it's a good day for him. No problems, he'll call the manufacture for more product. Mr Mom and pop is caller number 4. still with me?
Whole9Yards manufacturing makes black guns. They distribute to 100 wholesalers. They watch the news too. They get 100 calls in 15 minutes. They have orders for 100,000 guns. They can make 100 a day. Instantly they're 2 years behind. They tell the wholesalers they will fill orders as fast as they can. It takes 25# of raw materials to make 1 gun Dang, 100,000 guns, they need more raw materials. They call their material supplier and order 1300 tons of raw materials. on and on it goes.
Meanwhile Mom & pop are making phone calls on every supplier, same story each time.
On the bright side, customers are coming in in droves. In 5 days, their entire supply of ammo and black rifles is gone. $40k worth of inventory, nearly 1/4 of their annual business in one week! freakin awesome for them. They get one shipment in a month later with 4 rifles and 5,000 rounds of ammo in various calibers. Nothing else arrives. Word spreads that they have stuff on the shelves. A horde of customers stops in, cleans the place out again. They desperately try to order more stuff. hey get a call from their warehouse saying it's empty, and no new stock coming in for up to 18 months. Now, it's 4 months later. Shelves are empty, no one walks in the store anymore. but customers call every day - nope there's nothing new this week, no truck stopped by. 1/3 the way into the year, and they've sold 1/4 of their annual sales - and there's nothing else to sell. They get $300-400 worth of ammo in every 3 weeks. if they're lucky. They don't want to piss off customers, so they mark up the boxes about 10%. 20% of their customers bitch about gouging and never come back.
Mom and pop look at the bills. They've made $51,000 between December and January. Projections show over a million dollars of revenue for them this year. awesome! Oh wait, their credit's out, 90% is tied up in backorders. February thru May they've made $1600 on various pieces. April 15th, taxes were due. Guess what, taxes are up 20% due to the projected income shown by $50k worth of sales last fall. By this time last year, they had made close to 80 grand. But the bills are still due, so they use the vacation reserves to pay the shop insurance and taxes. Warehouse still shows 12 months till resupply. With no income projected, they look at cost cutting measures. what to do - Mortgage the property again to keep the doors open with empty shelves in the hope that their reputation remains and stock comes in and a bumper sales in the fourth quarter of the year? or do they close their doors until they have something to sell.
So for those who boohoo against stores facing this condition on the "they've made a years worth of sales" - did they really make a years worth of business or not? yep they had bumper sales, but do they really have a year's worth of inventory on hand. do you keep a year's worth of food and gas at your place? why not - you eat every day, you use fuel every day. You don't, because that much overhead would destroy you financially. But now, of course someone say's you're stupid because you are broke and hungry because there's a run on bacon and you can't get any to eat and the price of driving to the stores to look for it has made you run out of gas...