From posts piling up y'all can see the North Atlanta market is a great shooters mecca. We have lots of stores with lots of inventory. I have not seen any single item become completely unavailable locally. My previous posts I tried to not mention store names specifically and usually do that via PM. But now that cat is out of bag, stores named are good. My local shops are not shipping out of state but service drive in customers only so as to not sell completely out and burn their day to day customers. Do not know about the daily practices of the Athens and Duluth stores mentioned. I hope that they are doing the same and supporting their local customers as we support them. It is a partnership to keep the local industry working.
I believe the LGS's in some areas are unable to support their local customers at times because their own customers tend to go to the internet to save 10% thus they have no incentive to dig deep into reloading stock. If you build that relationship, nurture it, power buy in groups, you can usually get prices cheaper locally. But it takes time and commitment to the LGS of your choice. I keep repeating this hoping when this panic all ends some will take this lesson to heart. Most reloaders have friends that load too. So do you buy your components individually from the cheapest online place you can find or do you work collectively to find a local vendor and give him the opportunity to service your needs? It takes a tad of effort and a bit of time, but after a year or two of making a few large orders and waiting patiently for your LGS to look forward to seeing you come in the door. When you do, they take your list and get right on it. My group gives our LGS one list before SHOT show every year. He can pre-plan our major list into four shipments per year. Then, when we come in between scheduled shipments for one and two of this and that, he rings them up at the register different than what is on sticker due to our regular buying habits. If he is out of stock on what we need he asks is this a right now or something he can place on his next regular order? To make a special order and pay shipping on one box of 30 caliber bullets is hard for him. On items he does not have easy access to or making a special order is problematic he is straight up and suggests we try internet and if no luck, he will do what he can.
It takes a tad of effort but we make him more of a power buyer so he gets better prices which then passes on to us. It also encourages him to keep a fatter shelf of in-stock items for us and others. If he is buying 25k per quarter of primers for us, easy to add 10k for the store and knows that if others no take, he can eventually just put onto one of our stocking orders and never gets stuck. He actually was quite happy that we helped him build his inventory and knowledge over the years. During this bubble he has managed to sell a lot of reloading product, has the contacts and buying history with his distributors to be high on the list of stores to be nice to, and thus kept stock coming in almost as fast as it can roll out the door.
Now please don't take anything I have said personal or otherwise. Just my opinion and like rear ends, we all have one. Just take what I have said and think. How much product have you personally and your local reloading friends bought off the internet in the past five years? If as a collective y'all had ordered 70% of that from your LGS what do you think he would be doing for you now? Mine will get a shipment in of goodies and keep in the back till I stop in. He piles it on the counter and I stack what I want next to the register and take the rest and actually stock them on the public shelf in its proper location so he does not have to take time to fool with. I get first pick of everything reloading related in the door before it hits the shelf. Imagine how that would be to YOU right now? It absolutely rocks for me.
All this said I do still buy off the internet. When I see some special I know my LGS can't match I will hit the online folk. Like a few years ago when I purchased 50,000 62 grain SS109 bulk bullets when I saw a online special. Or recently when I bought just over 3,000 mixed bullets from Midway due to a special on a couple of sizes in 500 round packages. I did not let those impact my "regular" local orders. Same order I purchased two RCBS X-sizer dies, small based rifle die set, carbide rifle sizing die and a couple of micrometer bullet seating dies. The dogtown bullets my LGS can't get, the other stuff is specific special order which he had no one distributor that could get all of it. He would have had to place three separate orders to get what I needed thus I did the online thing and he knows it. Actually appreciates that I was not hard-nosed and expected him to round it all up for me as busy as he is. But I did ask him about the dies and only reason I saw the bullet deal was picking a vendor that had all my dies in stock for one order. Bottom line is this life is a team event. We chose our team mates and the more of them that we have a face to face relationship with the better.