Taken from the Sierra Bullets website:
Why Can't I Find Sierra Bullets?
As most Sierra customers have noticed, finding Sierra Bullets on shelves has become a little more difficult in the last 4-6 months. There are a lot of varying stories floating around as to the cause of this including:
- Sierra is slowing production to drive up prices.
- Sierra has too much military / law enforcement business and is focusing on fulfilling it instead of making bullets for the individual reloaders.
- The government is passing laws that effect how many bullets can be made and/or slowing raw materials to the shooting industry which we need to make bullets.
The real reason is demand. Sierra has been making more bullets per week recently than we have in our rich 62 year history, but we simply can not get ahead of the demand. After the 2008 elections, orders began increasing overnight and have only continued to increase thus far.
The bullets we sell to distributors that ultimately get sold to the individual reloaders (business we affectionately call our “Green Box” - business for obvious reasons) come off the same presses and out of the same lots as bullets we make for the military and law enforcement. While Sierra does prioritize the military orders to make sure our service men & women get what they need, the demand from the military is factored into our yearly planning and normally does not affect our green box production capacity.
For 2009 our military and law enforcement business, is only slightly higher than what we had predicted, and is not causing these shortages. The shortages are being caused by the huge increase in demand from the individual reloaders themselves and also by the OEM ammunition reloaders who are reacting to the same increase in demand.
We are seeing a lot of customers who decide (for whatever reason) that they need to have a few extra bullets tucked away for a rainy day. When they start looking for their favorite Sierra Bullets and do not find them, they grow concerned and look harder. Once they do find them in stock, they choose to buy double what they had planned, since they were so hard to find. This just compounds the problem for the next person trying to find those same bullets.
Rest assured – Sierra is working as hard as they can to increase capacity (without sacrificing our world renowned quality) and we are making more bullets now than ever. This demand will not last forever and you should see the bullets you have come to count on back on the shelves as we start making headway into our backlog.
We are very sorry for the shortages you are experiencing, but rest assured, we are working hard to correct them so you will again be able to find those familiar green plastic boxes on your dealer's shelves again.
Thank You,
The Sierra Bullets Team
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