30-30man:
I did say I would pay a "little" extra. I agree with you, those prices are your local shop are crazy!!!
Prices also vary with the distributor too. Some charge more than others. Acu-Sport and Jerry's Sportscenter are a couple of popular ones. Wal-Mart, for example, sells the Remington 710 out the door for $299. That is the dealer price from Jerry's. Wal-Marts sells the Mossberg ATR for $244. Jerry's dealer price is $238. When a local guy's price from the dealer is the same as Wal-Mart's retail price, the lilttle guy loses. He can't sell an item for no profit. Who'd run a business like that? You mentioned the Survivor .308 that Wal-Mart sells for $200. Dealer cost from Jerry's is $200. Yes, a $150 mark-up is nuts to us, but then you don't have to feed his family. If you've ever known dealer who is close to a Wal-Mart, the best way to piss him off is to say "Well, Wal-Mart.....".
The guns on the rack at Wal-Mart are ordered in bulk and stored in secure facilities at Wal-Mart Distribution Centers. They may order 10,000 at a time or more, and send them out to stores as they need to. No one, and I mean no one, can compete with that kind of volume, and that means big discounts on that bulk.
When Wal-Mart tells you that they will pay a certain amount for an item, that's what they pay. If you don't think so, last year the Hostess company closed several bakeries and distrubtion centers, and laid people off. Know why? Wal-Mart told them that they'll only pay this much for the product, and forced Hostess to sell at a loss. If Hostess didn't meet that price, they were out of Wal-Mart period. That would have caused them to close completely. In order to meet the price, Hostess was forced to re-organize. I know this because I still have many friends with Wal-Mart, and the company I work for now does business with Hostess. Can you imagine a world with no Twinkies???
Buying guns at Wal-Mart has it's disadvantages too. If there is a problem with the new gun, all Wal-Mart will do is send it to the repair center. That can take forever sometimes. When I worked there, they wouldn't send anything out until there was more than one to send. Most good dealers I know will look at the gun first to see if they can figure out the problem. If they can't, they will send it out (usually faster than Wal-Mart) or more often than not, just exchange it for another.
I will not be surprised at all if in the future Wal-Mart just stops selling guns totally. They are sloppy with the paperwork, how they store the guns, and how they sell the guns. The store closest to me (I worked there too) has been audited by the BATF so many times, it isn't funny. When I was a manager there, I did an audit and found 22 guns unaccounted for. 22!!! Ends up that the Sporting Goods department manager was giving guns away to her friends on bogus transactions. No paperwork was ever done on any of them. If you've bought a gun lately, lots of stores have a template that they put over the form to make sure it's filled out right. You can't pay someone $7.50 an hour and expect them to handle something like that proficiently.
For everyone that uses the Net, most of those people are "local guys" somewhere. They keep overhead low by using the Net.
