And they cost less to make and sell for 70% more. Somebody is making some money!!

 

Supply and Demand, Economics 101.

 

Been seeing a lot of 410 x 7.5 around NW Pa. lately. $13.50 box.

 

I use a 410 ga 3 inch a ton squirrel hunting. Also crow and quail hunt with one. Only way I can shoot it like I do is reloading. I bought a Mec 600 jr mark 5 410 ga 3 inch. Got a good deal on Remington long range express hulls. A 3 inch once fired hulls. I load up 35 boxes before fall squirrel hunting. It's harder to use bigger shot in the mec. I load them in a few 4, 5 shot. But most of the time 6 shot.

 

Xreys is a .22 allowed for squirrels where you hunt?
Only squirrels I ever shot with a shotgun was when I was hunting something else, just wondering.

 

I just never understood why there was a "shortage" of .410 ammo in the first place? It is not a high volume round, except for a few skeet shooters. And most of them reload anyway.

There are a some handguns that shoot it, like the Bond Arms Derringer, and the Taurus Judge. But those are novelty guns, that might see a couple of boxes shot through them a year.... If that.

As I said, it's just not a high volume round. There should be plenty of it with dust on the boxes at discount prices.... Like there was before.

 

As for the shortage of .410 ammo, I believe the shortage was due to panic buying from Covid and Democrat policies that lead to the Ukraine/Russia conflict. Now that components are difficult to source the manufacturers are focusing on the higher volume sellers to capitalise on the best sellers.

 

Supply and demand does dictate costs. Convert equipment from 12 guage that can run 24/7 for months with only maybe a velocity or shot charge change,,,, to pulling machine heads out from 12, and replace with .410, yes the materials are a minion, but the one week or ten day run has cost ALOT to convert and get started up, YES supply and demand, this hasn't changed in many years!

 

I just bought 410 AAs at $16.49 a box at Rural King in Plano, Il. They only had 6 boxes of 9s. All gone now, but they had another 15 or more in 8.5.

 

Win AA’s #8’s are 17.99 per box in my area. 50% shot and powder of 12 ga and double the price. Lame.

 

.410 shells have had sketchy availability since I started in the 1960's, and high cost also. There have been lots of .410 shotguns sold in that period of time. Expensive and hard to find shells have to be a big factor in people leaving the .410 bore guns at home. Maybe if they were reasonably priced and widely available, the ammo companies would have sold a lot more of them during the last 65 years.

28 is a really nice gun to shoot, but have never been popular except for skeet and some sporting clays guys. Of course that ammo is even harder to find than .410.

 

I reload it with components purchased long ago, and I'm at around $3.00/box/25.

I use it for Sporting Clays.

 

Guys, pricing is a little more complicated than high demand/high cost and less expensive to manufacture. I believe Federal, Winchester and Remington, make marketing estimations for the upcoming year. They stop a manufacturing line, dismantle it and install the .410 systems. That means less shells the manufacturing line previously made. Plus, all the other activities necessay to get the .410 line into production. Finally, once the number of cases that Marketing requested is done, the line is converted back to another guage. The "new line" has to be tested out and adjusted. The downtime costs money. When the .410 line is producting, the previous guage is not. There are a lot of hidden costs to making .410 shotshells. However, if you reload .410 shells, you can save money. I don't like the higher cost of .410 shells either.