Guns America Digest has a recent interview with Jason Hornady about their current production efforts and his expectations for ammo sales. It's interesting reading and may alleviate some fears about longer term ammo and component supplies. He confirms that much (most) of the current situation is the result of panic buying.
Panic buying is not the cause of the ammunition shortage. The ammo market has long shown a pattern of rapid and extreme peaks in demand over ~15 years, so that's a BS excuse.
We have an ammunition shortage because the companies in the industry have placed a static cap on their capacity and are reluctant to scale to meet periods of rapid increase in demand. That won't change until an innovative competitor enters the market and disrupts the status quo.
Is the factory running at 100% capacity?
How would you have them increase beyond 100%
Trained people do not grow on trees. At $20/hr, you can not even hire trainable people.
The factory I work is relevant. 52 weeks/year at 40 hrs/week equals 2080 hours per year.
Many of our employees worked over 3000 hours last year, some came very close to 3500 hrs.
Our schedule is 4/10 hour shifts per week. But the crews typically work 5/12s for 12 weeks, 6/12s for 16 weeks, and 7/12s for 24 weeks.
With two crews this allows us to run 24 hrs for five, six, or seven days per week. Yes, this is a huge amount of overtime pay, with double time for any Sunday worked. But as benefits cost about half as much as and on top of wages, it is a wash between overtime or adding employees.
The bottom line is: we can barely find enough competent new hires to replace those who retire or quit. There has been much discussion about putting on an additional shift and doing a 5/8 schedule so 7 days would only make 56 hour weeks instead of 84 hours.
But we simply can not find the people to fill out the crews. Every time we need two, we bring in six or eight then fire all but one in the first two weeks for dirty piss test, tardiness, or just simple laziness.
Now these are simple entry level jobs. But the guys who do work them sure do drive some expensive rigs.
So, back to the ammo factory. I doubt they can find people to put on additional shifts. If they are already running 24/7, they can not do much better than that.
Perhaps the shareholders would like to pay for a nice new factory and gamble they could sell enough product to pay for the factory before the craziness ends and they have to close the doors?
