I'm not getting defensive, but now I am getting a little pissed. DO NOT assume anything about Hodgdon and Powder Valley because of the story I told about the .22 ammo. That was merely an example of how SOME people have tried to put all the blame on manufacturers, when the real problem was, again, much higher demand.
Let me state it again, a little differently, and maybe you'll grasp the problem: There's so much demand, more distributors are ordering more. There isn't enough powder to fill all the orders, so each gets a prorated part of what they ordered when powder does show up. The companies with the longest-standing orders get the first supplies.
I know this through talking to several different powder companies.
The reason Hodgdon powders tend to show up in batches is they come from Australia in ships. When a ship full of powder shows up, a bunch of Hodgdon powder shows up.
Every serious handloader I know has been buying as much powder as possible whenever it shows up anywhere. Prior to Obama's reelection, most started looking for powder when their started getting low, because they assumed they could always buy more--maybe not today, but within a couple weeks or a couple months.
Now every serious reloader (and even some that weren't so serious) is buying as much powder as they can whenever they find it. Last summer one of the local stores got in a big batch of jugs of Hodgdon Extremes. They were gone in a few days, for exactly that reason. The same amount of powder used to last the store 6-8 months. That is happening all over the country, whether at retail stores or places like Midway.
Every time somebody on the Campfire finds powder in a store or on an Internet site they post where to buy it. And then everybody does, and it's gone, sometimes within hours, instead of the supply lasting weeks or months.
So the store or distributor orders more, when they just sold what would normally be several months worth of powder, but the powder company doesn't have any more, and won't for several months--and when they do, it has to be divvied up among more orders for even more powder, so nobody gets all they ordered, and some don't get any until the next batch shows up.
When customers complain about the lack of powder the store or distributor blames the powder company. It's that simple.
