John,
My apologies, no offense intended and not trying to put you on the defensive, just trying to have a discussion to better understand the root causes.
Let's not conflate 22LR with smokeless powder shortages. I am really just interested in the powder shortage cause for purposes of this discussion.
Trying to sort through your answer, do you believe that the supply of Varget actually available to complete retail transaction in the US has been constant for the last 10 years? This seems inconsistent with the anecdotal reports of the vendors, and my own personal experience, as just one example.
What I see is that one particular powder will appear in lots of stores at once. Then months later all stores have a different powder, but they all have it.
The ADI (supplier of Varget) "bottleneck" equals a supply side problem. The problem is not with the powder manufacturer, and not the retail customers, but a change in government policy, which is restricting delivery, and thus reducing the supply in the US to fill retail orders.
Powder Valley customers cannot be hoarding that which is not even in the warehouse to fill an order, unless reading your example above you believe Hodgdon has cut off Powder Valley, Midway, Graf's and their colleagues, which would seem to be an odd policy.
Thoughts?
