Wal Mart Guns

[Mil Dot]

Much of the situation with Wally's pricing has to do with volume buying of specific models, calibers etc. If you think that Wally deals with the same wholesaler as a small gunshop owner does ... not! They deal directly with the company involved thus cutting out the wholesale middle men and their margins. Most of the guns you see on Wally's shelves are for example 30-06, 7mag, 270 or the popular caliber of the day. They are all about volume and moving product be it guns or tennis shoes. They don't like stagnant inventory either and monitor what moves in what stores so if they have certain guns for over a certain amount of time that haven't rotated, here comes a roll down in the pricing to move the stock and free up inventory $ for better movers or new looks. This is when you can pickup some outstanding bargains at Wally world. Now, that being said I've never seen any deals like this at the Super Wallys, only at the smaller size stores so it may be possible that if a new line of guns is coming in that the Supers' get the cream of new product and the older lines are reallocated to the smaller stores forcing them to eat the markdowns and keep the Supers looking like shining stars to the stock holders. Of course, I'm just speculating on the reallocation theory and you will never find any corporate official who would fess up to that, but ....

Most small gun shop owners deal with middleman wholesalers, not actual company reps and of course, they have their own
"volume pricing program". For example if you wanted to be a Remington salesperson and went to their website to apply for the position you get redirected to a company in whichever region of the country you wanted to sell their guns in and would have to meet the secondary employers requirements to sell remington guns.
So now as a customer you've paid the company cut, the 1st level resellers cut and the secondary sellers cut and then are completely dependent on the amount of merchandise your local gun shop has purchased from him in order to get his lowest pricing matrix and thus the lowest price he can sell it to you for.
In other words, there are a lot more mouths being feed when you buy from the local Mom & Pop shop. Then multiply it by the number of manufacturers they carry so the customer has some variety to choose from. You can't just sell Remmy's.