Look, I'm all for free enterprise and all that. However, I've got a dark feeling about this.
Back when I was a young guy, I worked in a technical sales position for a local computer networking firm. This was at the dawn of computer networks in the office. Most customers were getting their first taste. Some were new to computers as a whole or they were replacing mainframes. We had distributors that would sell us whatever we needed, and then we'd mark it up and resell it, providing our services along the way. We made all our real profit on services, so our markup on things like monitors and keyboards and such was light.
One of my boss' primary rules were to not source stuff from distributors that also sold retail to the public. His reasoning was that they made direct competitors, and at any point they could screw us.
Here we have Hodgdon going direct to the public via the internet. We also have them now gobbling up most of the domestic powder business. It used to be that everyone had choices of who they bought from. If (A) had lower prices than (B) , you could buy from (A). Now (H) owns everything and is now competing with the online retailers. This could be devastating to guys like Powder Valley and other companies who rely on a strategy of taking a low profit margin and making up for it in volume.
As I said: dark feelings about this.
