Wal Mart Guns

[fabsroman]

Okay, lets assume that a Remington Model 700 rifle, with the exact same specs, is made a little cheaper for Wally than for Dicks Sporting Goods or another small retailer. Wouldn't there be a possible fraud action against Remington? The same exact model from place A to place B should be essentially the same. Now, what I do know is that some of these quality manufacturers might make things for Wal-Mart but package it under Wal-Mart's brand. For instance, Ol-Roy dog food is Wal-Mart's brand of dog food; however, I do not know if Wal-Mart actually manufactures it.

At the end of the day, I would believe that reputation does matter to small companies like Ruger and Remington. If I am spending $577 on a Ruger rifle at Wal-Mart, why wouldn't I just spend a couple hundred more to get something of quality from Sako instead of the Ruger, assuming that it was made like crap for Wal-Mart, or better yet, just buy the Ruger at a small shop and pay a little more.

I am sure we would have heard a lot from fellow shooters and hunters with the Wal-mart "garbage" Remington 700 rifle, but I haven't really heard of anybody complaining about a specific instance where their Wal-Mart gun was a POS compared to their buddy's identical gun that was bought at the local dealer instead of Wal-Mart.

With that said, I am sure that Wal-Mart does have some crappy guns made for it, like the Remington 710 that I would not touch with a 10 foot pole, but I have also seen that POS for sale at Dick's. I just think the 710, although crappy and probably cheap, fits the bill for the walk-in customers at Wal-Mart.

Another point is that the Ruger 77MKIIVT I want is listed at $577. That isn't necessarily cheap in my book, so I would assume that Wal-Mart is not getting a special run of them made by Ruger with crappola steel. Plus, how many of these target/varmint guns do you think Wal-Mart sells each year? I doubt a lot of people go into Wal-Mart and ask to special order it. In fact, I was thinking about buying mine from a dealer 10 miles north of me, and only stumbled across the Wal-Mart site through this website.

Sure, Wal-Mart probably gets a quantity discount from the manufacturer, and it definitely avoids the middleman, but I seriously doubt that Wal-Mart makes contracts with these gun companies to have them make cheaper guns. In fact, I am willing to bet that these gun companies are already making the guns as cheaply as possible. I have a friend that works in DeWalt's corporate headquarters as a bean counter. An assignment he once had was to put all their parts/raw material supplies for these tools on a spreadsheet and then call around to see if they could get the same parts/raw materials at a cheaper price and/or beat DeWalt's current suppliers into charging less. However, DeWalt never once thought about building anything that was less reliable. Oh yeah, DeWalt is owned by Black & Decker.

At the end of the day, I think a Black & Decker Model 919 (ficticious model #) screwdriver purchased at Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Ace Hardware, or the mom & pop store will be the same thing. Granted, every screwdriver will have a different failure point, but I bet on average the ones bought from Wal-Mart will be the same as the ones bought from all these other stores.