Warehouse space costs money. (Light, Heat, the building, property taxes etc.)
If I can plan my production so that I ship product to my customers shortly before they need it. They can also dedicate more shelf space to different items. I can have 3 boxes of 10 items or to make AZR44 happy, I can have 30 boxes of 1 item. (Then I'd have to listen to AZR44 grouse about "All they carry is one item, and not the one I need!!") Damned if you do damned if you don't.
Before I took OCP's warehouse we have $15 Million in inventory in a 500K sq ft. warehouse. Annual sales were around $70million a year. So for every 1 dollar in SALES (not profit) we went and literally put it on a shelf. Not on new equipment, not spent on marketing (probably a good thing), salaries, R&D, or anything else. We put $$$ in racks and on pallets on the floor. A year later that was down to $5 million even though we had merged with another company and absorbed their inventory. We sold quite a bit of obsolete inventory for pennies on the dollar. It was even more critical for us since ours was a seasonal business. Having $$$$ tied up in old inventory would not have allowed us to pay our bills during the slow season and order new materials for upcoming season.
See all that inventory is $$$$ You have to pay for it. Everything you see sitting on a shelf in (most) stores is money. The store has paid for that and is holding it waiting for you to buy it.
So if you hate JIT, put your money where your mouth is. Take 1/5th of your pay and put it in a safe. (Not a bank account or other investment), just let it sit for a year a more. Let inflation eat it away. It's even worse with old out of date product, the longer it sits the smaller the ROI until you get to the point your giving it away just to get rid of it. Now, if you do hang on to it long enough, it just might become collectible. (depending on the item).
And Lupinus, probably the reason you get the e-mails is i would guess it comes from 10% of the store managers, the ones that don't know how figure their stocking levels for various items, and constantly either under order or don't maintain what they should. The only problems I ever had (both at OCP and B-Way) was when something weird happened. "Wow, XYZ set a record for how much paint they made in one day, they are now out of cans, ship them everything we have."
That's what going on with ammo. Ammo manufacturer's have years and years of sales data on how much of each caliber they pruduce and ship. (Along with annual growth and/or declines), so they produce to that number, even though AZR44 thinks they should have whatever he wants whenever he wants it, at a reasonable price, no matter their costs. We did the same thing at B-way with 1/2 pint cans, switch one of the lines over, run what we knew we would sell in a year plus a little more. Which was a roughly 7 to 10 days worth of production time. Stick them in the warehouse and ship them out over the course of the year as orders came in. Now. It took three days to change the line from pints to half-pints and another three days to change it back. So we had to make enough pints to cover orders during that 2-3 weeks we wouldn't be making pints. We only did it once a year because a can line not making cans was not making money (but we still had to pay people to do the changeovers. That was roughly 6 days out of 240 production days lost. Which is why we only did once a year.
It happened a few years ago with .380 ammo. They would make X amount of .380 ammo once a year, put it in the warehouse, change the machines over to different caliber and sell to the ammo wholesalers out of stock. Well Ruger, S&W and bunch of other companies all cme out with .380 (Six IIRC) at about the same time. Demand for .380 ammo, which for years had been X, suddenly went to 3, 4, 5, 6 times X. .380 became unobtainium.
Same thing has happened since December. Once the TPTB decided that EBR's, PMags, and ammo shoudl be unobtainium, everyone and their brother has gone out an d bought, bought bought. Far above and beyond their previous usage and they are not using it, just hoarding it.
AZR44 is the ammo that you are coveting to buy replacement for what you used (current consumption) or to add to your pile/hoard?
They answer to that question will give you the answer as to why you can't find it.
And it's not JIT inventory's fault. It's our fault for pushing demand far beyond the production capacity. Yes, I know ammo makers should just have machines, materials and workers sitting around waiting for the next panic so that you won't be inconvenienced.
