By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
With deer season two months away, hunters might have a hard time finding rifle ammunition.
Availability is low, prices are rising, and supplies have been thin at local shops for months.
“I don’t know what the answer is right now,” Orion Sporting Goods manager Melissa Greenhalgh told the Sentinel this week. “Come hunting season, I don’t know what I’m going to tell people, because we’ve been limiting people when we do get stuff to one box, so that more people can, you know, kind of spread the wealth. But that’s my .308, .30-06, .300, all the stuff that everybody shoots – and I have zero.”
A shelf that once would have been stacked with those popular hunting cartridges was bare.
Cartridges on the shelf were old stock, she said. While popular rounds such as .30-06 Springfield and .308 Winchester were entirely sold out, there were boxes of more esoteric ammunition such as .25-06, .22-250, and 6.5x55. The third is a Swedish and Norweigian military cartridge developed in the 1890s.
Greenhalgh said she sees no end to the shortage of hunting rounds.
“Hunting ammo right now – we’re getting nothing. Our last three ammo shipments, there’s been zero hunting ammo on it. We’ve been told hunting rounds are on the back burner, because the companies are too busy pumping out the stuff that’s selling right now, which is 9mm and .45 and 5.56mm. So yeah, we haven’t seen hunting rounds for eight months probably, and they’re telling us not to count on it any time soon,” she said.
Evan McCrehin, Orion Sporting Goods sales clerk, stands in front of empty ammunition shelves at the store this afternoon. Sitka, like much of the rest of the country, has seen an unusual shortage of ammunition. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
The ammunition shortage began with the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020 and continued during the election cycle, she said.
She recommended Sitkans conserve whatever ammunition they have on hand.
“Right now, you’ve got to go to the range and sight in, you’ve just got to be really careful with what you use to sight in and you’re going to have to make those 40 rounds the last the hunting season. I can’t tell you to buy a (rifle chambered in) .25-06, because who is to say in a month that’s not gone,” she said.
Mostly bare with only a handful of less-common cartridges, the ammunition shelves at Russell’s told a similar story.
“Most everything that’s on the shelves right now is what people have had on the shelves, and then the unfortunate part is as soon as it does arrive, it sells very, very quickly,” owner Steven Eisenbeisz told the Sentinel. “Even though most people in Sitka have been really good about just buying a box or two, when you only get ten boxes that’s not very many customers you can help.”
He noted some customers are concerned about finding ammunition needed to fill a freezer with venison.
“I don’t think demand has necessarily increased, but I know I talk to a lot of people who at this point are becoming extremely anxious about getting ammo for hunting. The majority of people I know right now, they want .44 ammo for bear, they want shotgun ammo for bear, and they just want a box or two of ammo to hunt with,” Eisenbeisz said. “And unfortunately with the lack of supply everywhere, I think people are going to have a hard time even getting a box just to go get a couple deer with… we have people who stop in weekly just to look, people that call on the phone. It’s daily.”
An average hunter, he added, can make it through a deer season with a single 20-round box of rifle ammunition.
With the local deer season opening for bucks in August, he recommended that those without ammunition ask friends for assistance.
“Ask your friends for five, six rounds. I think there’s probably some people with enough rounds that they can share a few with their buddies for hunting season. But yeah, I’m not optimistic about being able to have a full supply for hunting. So if you have friends or family that might be able to help you out, that would probably be the best route,” he said.
Down the road at Guns of Alaska, Tom Conatser echoed the other shops in town.
“Everything is out nationwide. And as fast as one lot of ammo gets put on the market, everybody buys it immediately. There’s simply no backstock anywhere in the system… and because of that people keep panic buying,” Conatser said.
He spends many hours searching for ammunition online. “Our distributors, the scariest thing happened to our distributor. They went from not having ammo… they limit the boxes of ammo that we can purchase… our wholesale distributor limits to two boxes on popular hunting cartridges now. Boxes, not cases, forty rounds total. So I was excited to see .300 Winchester Magnum, very popular bear cartridge in Southeast Alaska. Totally stoked. Went to order 20 of them, I got two. Same thing with .30-06, same thing with .270, and those are the only three they had available that day, so I ordered six whole boxes of ammo.”
He added that on a national level, large companies make ammunition in batches, by cartridge.
“The problem with the ammo industry in America right now, to put it in plain, simple terms, is when you’re an ammo manufacturing company, whether it’s CCI, Hornady or any of them, some calibers they only do a run for two weeks a year,” Conatser said. “They set up all their equipment to make, say .270 ammo… you allot this much time to make this much bullets and you sell them all year. When we run into a situation like hyper-inflation of ammo like what we have right now where everybody’s buying everything the moment it’s made, they simply can’t make everything all at the same time.”
Much like the other shops in town, there was little ammunition at Guns of Alaska, though some gunpowders and projectiles were in stock.
When ammunition does appear on the market, the price is significantly higher than it was in recent memory, local retailers said.
“Prices have gone up substantially, so our main supplier – Hornady – we’ve had to agree to four price increases since last July and we just had to agree to another ten percent price increase to continue getting ammo in the future. Raw materials are definitely driving up ammunition cost right now. I think it’s just materials, I don’t think they’re inflating prices just due to demand,” Eisenbeisz said.
Increased costs have already impacted ammunition sales in Sitka.
“I recently had a shipment of .30-06 ammo come in. And this is before the last ten percent price increase I just had to agree to, a box that I used to sell for $42 was on the shelf for $67. So next shipment, add ten percent to that,” Eisenbeisz said.
He bases his ammunition prices on the popular website MidwayUSA, which now has no .308 offerings below $2 per round. In recent years, standard hunting ammunition often retailed for just over $1 per round. Even at inflated prices, of 158 selections of .308 ammunition on the Midway site today only 16 are in stock. The online inventory of .30-06 Springfield tells a similar story, with only three items in stock out of 114 listed. The cheapest .30-06 rounds in stock are made by Hornady and sell for $3.05 per round.
Today, copper sells for $4.42 a pound on the Nasdaq, more than double the $2.10 cost in March 2020. Copper is used to make cartridge brass and the exterior jacket of most lead-core bullets. Some bullets are solid copper.
Price hikes have hit Orion, too.
“We used to sell 9mm for $18 a box, now it’s $30 a box, and that’s not us raising… I definitely know getting components is harder, so their components have gone up,” Greenhalgh said.
Shipping costs also have gone up, she noted.
Conatser said Alaska Marine Lines fees combined with low availability of ammo have raised prices.
“Now where that hurts us, Orion, Russell’s and everyone else, is we only get a price break from AML above 80 pounds. It’s really hard to make money and keep a price fair if you can only order ten pounds of ammo at a time and you still have to pay the minimum freight charge… Our last order, the price broken down per item in the shipment was an extra $5.75 per box,” Conatser reported.
Eisenbeisz noted this as well, saying that AML fuel surcharges have risen by about ten percent.
Despite increased costs, Conatser said products sell quickly.
“Sometimes ammo moves super quick. I’ve seen two cases of 9mm disappear in three hours. And that’s people coming and saying, ‘Is there a limit?’ We don’t limit anything on the sales floor; everything that’s out where the public can see is for sale in any limit they want to spend money on,” he said.
Guns of Alaska doesn’t impose limits; Orion and Russell’s do.
Conatser noted the increases in metal and fuel costs, but added that some online sellers are marketing ammunition at wildly inflated prices.
“With the world shut down the price of metal is going up. Lead has gone up, copper has gone up, gas has gone up. All of that has to affect it… the problem is the rate it went up is completely due to COVID panic and people freaking out and hoarding,” he said. “That’s the only explanation. No, when you see a brick of Blazer (lower-end pistol ammo) selling for $300 instead of $18, it’s not because of inflation.”
A search of the popular online firearms and ammunition auction site Gunbroker today shows little 9mm ammunition below $1 per round. Some is listed for sale at much higher prices.
Greenhalgh said a Sitkan could order ammo online and pay significant shipping fees atop already inflated prices. She recommended locals save what they already have on hand.
“You just have to be conservative with what you have, especially for us. Because down south, online prices right now are crazy, a dollar a round for 9mm,” she said. “If you can find it, it’s ridiculously expensive, but we can’t even get on and pay for it because they won’t ship it. You can’t even get online and buy expensive ammo if you wanted to… You’d have to pay hazmat fees and minimum charges. It would end up costing a lot if you could find it.”
Factory-loaded rifle ammunition isn’t the only item in short supply. Those who load their own ammunition, retailers said, will have a hard time locating components.
“Bullets are coming available here and there, but it’s the primers and the powder that you can’t get. We’ve got in 12 pounds (of gunpowder) in probably the last nine, ten months. When we placed our big order in December, that’s supposed to last us all year. We got six pounds off of that maybe,” Greenhalgh said.
For a handloader, ammunition has four components: bullets, brass, primers and gunpowder.
Eisenbeisz told a similar story. He said he didn’t expect to see primers in stock again this year.
“Powder is shipping periodically to people, but I don’t expect to see any reloading primers this year. All the primers are being used up by the companies making the ammo. They’re pumping out ammo as fast as they can running 24/7 shifts and I was told by Federal (ammunition company) representative not to expect primers this year… or beyond. While we’re optimistic that we could get some powders still in the store, I don’t expect to see primers,” he said.
A major manufacturer told the Sentinel via email that production lines are running day and night.
“We are running our CCI/Speer and Federal factories 24/7 and shipping products for commercial distribution every day... There are a lot of rumors right now about ammunition and components not making their way to retail that are just not true. There are also resellers outside of our customer base who will always try to take advantage of pricing in times of high demand. We are proud to employ thousands of Americans across the country who work hard to make and ship products for hunters, shooters, reloaders... The health of our workforce during the pandemic is critical and we are proud to have kept running safely as an essential American business,” CCI, Federal, and Speer president Jason Vanderbrink wrote in a statement to the Sentinel.
Reloading primers are small metal discs that contain a small explosive charge used to ignite gunpowder.
At Guns of Alaska, Conatser said, the handloading component situation is similar.
“As far as reloading components go, we can buy bullets again, the projectile is possible to buy again. They’re still out of stock, no back order on most of our pages but we can find it. It’s still you have to find it when it’s there and buy it when it’s there, but it’s easier for them to catch up on that,” he said.
Like the others, he said powder and primers are still hard to find.
“Powder, you still have to get very lucky and find powder. And then primers are the Holy Grail right now and nobody can seem to find them,” he said.
Online, MidwayUSA stocks 64 types of primers, but only one kind is in stock. They’re meant for the .50 BMG Cartridge and wouldn’t work in a common deer round like .30-06. On the auction site Gunbroker, many sellers list primers for more than 20 cents each. In Sitka, before COVID, primers often sold for under 5 cents each.
Greenhalgh said she hasn’t seen primers for sale here for some time and doesn’t know when she will.
“For a while we had magnums left over, because we had a good stock of them and they’re less popular. But even those are gone, and that was with us limiting people on how many they could buy. I haven’t seen primers, any, in months… I don’t know that they know, our distributors,” she said.
She recalled when Orion back-stocked significant amounts of hunting ammunition.
“Half of our backroom used to be hunting ammo, just stacked as deep as we could stack it, and now there is zero back there,” she said.
