Cabelas is about the only exception. Mind you, their "store" is the size of most malls.
Most stores order by the cases. They might arrive on a pallet, but it'd be all the cases of the various calibers. Maybe if they got a really special deal they might get a pallet.
QFT.
Most LGS and Wal-marts would order maybe 3 or 4 flats of .22LR per week. mtnbkr's example of 50 is 5 flats. IIRC from when we shipped a pallet of .22 from CMP to the Alaska Boy Scouts (for their summer camp), it had 3 .5 or 4 layers of 12 flats each, and we had to downstack a couple of flats because it made the back tires of the forklift come off the ground. So Cabela's moving 2-3 pallets per week would not be unreasonable. Billy Bob's House o' Gunz, maybe a flat or two. Wal-Mart/Large Hill of the Male Goose/etc. (depending where) 3-10 flats per week.
Probably 70+% of the members of my club would stop at Wal-mart/House o' Gunz/Large Hill of the Male Goose on their way to shoot there. The other 30% either reloaded or still had leftovers from their previous trips. Hardly anyone hoarded or stockpiled. Why? It was always there, on the shelves, just waiting for you to grab a box. Plus, it was the salad days. It was cheap. The Iron Curtain had fallen, the commies needed hard currency and so emptied out all their warehouses filled with guns and ammo ($19 Mosins and $39 SKS's, spam cans of 7.62x39 for $20), life was great. Same with US cailbers. All that ammo we had stockpiled in Europe, most of the ASP's closed, and that stuff had to go somewhere. The military was shrinking, "we" didn't need all that excess ammo, plus it costs money to store it. You could shoot all day, everyday, for less then what you would spend on breakfast for a family of four at MickeyD's.
Those days are over, and sadly, they are not coming back. Will ammo prices fall? Yes, but not to pre-panic levels. The cost of materials alone has gone up, plus transportation costs. Figure it will stabilize at about 1/3 over what it was pre-panic (around $30 a box of 550-ish.)
