Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Price haggling

Sees the "good ol days" of haggling the price on a new gun are mostly gone.
The decline of the small local gunstore is one reason. Big retailers operating on a slimmer margin have made it tough on the small guy. Even my favorite large independent shop has a "the price is the price" policy in place. Seems to work well for them, the prices always seem fair.
Used guns is where price haggling lives now. Every used gun is to some degree unique, there is no stack of identical guns someplace. Pretty much no direct competition.
With a used gun, the profit is most often made when the gun is acquired by the dealer, either by trade or outright sale.
Its not too difficult to make a pretty good guess about what kind of mark-up a dealer is making on a new gun.
Not so with used. No telling what kind of coin the store has in a gun.
Always good to make them a respectable offer if you are serious. Ya never know......

I call it jewin em down

LGS has to be competitive if they want to stay open.

Folks go into buy a gun local knowing what Buds / grab-a-gun / etc is charging.

I’m the type, mark it the best you can do....

Not $50 over priced, then knock off $25 and act like it’s my lucky day.

I am very fortunate to have an awesome gun shop where haggling isn't even an issue. I have a price in mind and I ask whats the best they can do and 9 out of 10 times they are right where they need to be with me.


I was given a gift certificate of 200 bucks to another gun shop. Couldn't find anything I wanted, they had one of those new plain jane plastic stocked 10/22 that came out about a year ago, heck bps was selling them for 179 and my lgs too. Anyway, it was marked 239, crazy, but being I had a gc it wasn't a big deal...so I asked what they could do, 10 bucks off would have been fine with me, the guy grabbed it from me, put it back on rack, and walked away. Needless to say I'll never step foot in or promote that store in the future. I also asked about the ruger lcp 22, he said rugers sucked and he'll never stock any of their stuff. In reality, he probably just can't get good deals when ordering to be competitive.

I tell me LGS, “make the price fair for both of us.”

You can haggle on gun prices all day, every day in the classifieds section.........

I don't know if they still are since the original owner/manager Darryl Whittaker died but Whittaker's Guns was "no-haggle" pricing on both new and used guns for as far back as I can remember but they were always fairly and more often than not better than fairly priced anyway.

And thats how it should be done.

I hate hagglers.

25 years ago I worked at an ultrasound start up and went out buying guns at lunch at least once a week.

There were pawn shops that would take 10% off anything not on consignment, but not a penny more.

There were pawn shops that would take 20% off any gun without asking the boss. Offer 25% less, they would ask the boss, but the boss always said "no".

If you think about it, you can understand how they got such rigid rules. What if you owned a pawn shop. What would you tell employees to say if given an offer?

Offering someone a fair price on an item when they say what'll you give? is fine.

Haggling for a lower price knowing you've already been offered a fair deal, is a joo tightwad POS.

Any cock-sucker stealing guns for pennies on the dollar from a Widow should be shot on sight, pissed on, then fed to the hogs!

The extent of my haggling is, "Is that the best you can do?", if that.

We recently did an intervention on such a guy.

Good, hope you all gave the sidewalk a good coating from his head innards walking back to your vehicles.

Most of my area LGSs are well inflated on price. No haggling on new firearms a little wiggle on used. I identify what I want. Find a reasonable price online. Do the math for shipping and transfer fees at the LGS. Example: $1000 rifle+ $30 shipping+$25 transfer fee = $1055 out the door. After finding the total number, I will approach the LGS and give them the option to price match it. If they are willing to try to get close, even if it is a little more, then they get the sale. If not they only get the transfer... They still get my business; they have the opportunity to choose how much profit they earn. Sometimes they get close and sometimes they don’t.

Most recently was a Ruger Hawkeye RSI online for $899 plus $65 in shipping and transfer fees. The best the LGS would do was $1099 plus tax from their original $1199 price. They only got the transfer.

The big retailers often sell firearms for less than small dealers can buy them at wholesale.

My local WM just sold Savage Axis rifle for $125, almost half off their usual price of $242.

The small dealer wholesale price for the same rifle is $280.

Add 15% to cover overhead expenses bumps the minimum reasonable LGS price to $322.

Just like the "Dollar" stores are putting small independent grocery stores out of business, big retailers can easily undercut LGS prices and still make a profit.

Back in the late 1980's when I frequented Bill Gilderdale's LGS in very small, very rural, Stockbridge, VT, ol' Bill complained bitterly about how he couldn't afford to stock a full line of factory ammo because WM sold the common/popular ammo like 243, 270, 30-30, 308, and 30-06 for less than he could buy it. That was before the internet was the marketplace that it is today, so things are even more difficult for the small dealer.

Again, Whittaker's Guns not only managed to survive but grow bigger and continues to grow in spite of competition from big box gun retailers and did it starting off in a garage in a rural, 'off-the-beaten-path', low traffic location, too.

When I worked in a retail shop, we were firm on new gun prices but would haggle on trade value. The owner of that store loved trade-ins and didn't mind the haggling which went with it. I enjoyed the process as long as there was reason on both sides. As a gunsmith, I didn't haggle though and an attempt to get me to work more cheaply was likely to result in getting to try and have the work done elsewhere; forever.
Sometimes, trading got complicated and there were scopes, mounts, loading dies, slings, and all sorts of ammo and components in play. It was in one of these multiple trades that I sold a guy his own scope mounts; for half price, mind you! It was a couple of days later that he came back in and said, "You prick! You sold me my own scope mounts!" I said, "Yes, I did but, if you recall, I gave you a smokin' deal on them."
The owner of this particular shop was merciless when it came to buying guns or anything else. He once bought quite a bunch of a young man who didn't seem quite right, to me. Sure enough, later that day, the guy's father called. The kid was a schizophrenic and had taken a bunch of his dad's stuff and run off. I told him we would hold the stuff and he said he would cover costs. The store owner said he saw no reason we shouldn't be compensated for our trouble and we should double the amount we paid. I explained that that wasn't something a place I worked for would do and he finally agreed to eschew any profits on the deal. This tendency to want to rip anyone off if the opportunity arose finally resulted in us parting ways.
Today, I don't like to haggle at all. If something seems priced high, I don't buy it. If someone offers me a lower price for something, I don't sell it. The only exception to this is real estate. GD

I used to like LGS until they sent all of their unemployed retarded family members to go stand in line at walmart and academy to buy up all of the 3 box limit rimfire ammo.

fat bitches with a list

Different people, different places, different outcomes.

Local pawn shop generally has guns marked to book price, but he never gives more than $100 on pawn. The sole exception, he said, was a pre 64 M70 fwt- he gave the guy $200, and when it wasn't redeemed, he kept it himself.