Wal Mart Guns

[fabsroman]

What makes it really tough for the small shop is the cost of inventory. If they are going to carve out a niche market (i.e., collector and high end guns) to compete with Wal-Mart and K-Mart, they have to invest a ton of money in inventory to have something for the customer to look at. I know I would want to look at a gun before I dropped 10K on it, or for that matter, 20K. If the small shop were to have 20 guns that cost them 5K a piece, that would be $100K in inventory. Financing $100K in inventory would cost them several thousands of dollars a year, and that is only if they stocked 20 guns. Imagine if they stock a bunch of guns and some of the real high end guns. Of course, I am assuming that the wholesalers aren't letting them have the guns without paying for them up front.

When I am in Wal-Mart, about the only thing I look for is gun cleaning supplies and ear plugs. I have looked at the gun racks every once in a while just to see what they are carrying, but I doubt they would ever carry anything I am interested in other than a Ruger 10/22. Then again, if you go to Wal-Mart's website, I seem to remember that you can order some of the nicer guns on its website.

Just checked out Wal-Mart's special order gun portion of its website and it appears that you can order almost every semi auto shotgun from Browning, Remington, Mossberg, and Winchester. They also have o/u's on the site from Winchester and Remington and I believe Charles Daily. They have bolt action rifles on the site from Browning and Remington, including the Browning A-Bolt and the Remington 700 BDL. From the looks of it, they had plenty of rifles for sale in the special order department. For some reason, I remember talking about this before on this chatboard.