Yes, at the beginning of a panic it seems like you're clever because there's still .25-06 and .17 HMR on store shelves, but the secret is that these cartridges are always more expensive than their more standard counterparts. And during a sustained shortage (like what happened during covid), the ammo plants focus on their highest volume products which they sell to civilian, law enforcement, and government.
When you stick to .22LR, .223/5.56, 9x19, .308/7.62x51 NATO, and 12 gauge, you're taking advantage of the economy of scale that comes with these cartridges. So just buy those while they're cheap and wait out shortages like this one.
I do have .22LR but the only .22 rifle I have is a Ruger K10/22 and I am probably going to sell it. I am not a fan of their firing mechanism and I don't really like auto-loaders. About 98% of my shooting is the .22 winmag due to the length of my fields. I reserve the 30-O6 for protecting the horses and family from anything big that comes around but that is thankfully very rare.
It's a little bit of an oddity in the modern JIT supply-chain era but this is effectively still an industry that runs on a large buffered inventory. Or at least, relies on customers to buffer inventory sufficient to their needs when it's actually available.
> Yes, at the beginning of a panic it seems like you're clever because there's still .25-06 and .17 HMR on store shelves, but the secret is that these cartridges are always more expensive than their more standard counterparts.
I will disagree with this slightly because it's all a question of how fast demand spikes and how quickly you burn through the inventory buffers. We actually saw during the pandemic that sometimes less popular calibers are cheaper than the in-demand ones (eg: 38sp/357 Mag/sometimes even 44 Mag could be cheaper than 9mm), but it's only because there just isn't much demand for them. Once that buffer burns through, it's done, and they won't be making more for a while, and it will come in at a much higher price.
There are a few calibers that ride the line, 40 S+W is an interesting one because there is a fairly decent constant level of demand for it from LEO usage (it is, famously, the FBI caliber), so it gets produced, but there's also not a lot of retail demand for it. Sometimes this means it crosses over and is cheaper than 9mm.
A lot of guns can swap between 9mm and 40S+W if you change the barrel (and sometimes different mags), and often you can get police-surplus 40S+W guns significantly cheaper than the 9mm equivalents. The price difference often means you can get a used 40S+W Glock or SIG, plus a replacement 9mm barrel, for roughly the same price of the used 9mm version of the gun. Nice little bit of market inefficiency there. But that's a pro purchase for shortages because 40S+W really doesn't get hit bad like 9mm does, you can pretty much always find it and sometimes it will indeed be cheaper than 9mm.
38sp and 357 can have the same thing, although not as often or as much. The other wildcard used to be 7.62x39, during shortages you could always rely on Brown Bear or Wolf being churned out by the case-load, but, obviously Russia being a belligerent here (and Ukraine having a decent amount of AKs and other combloc weapons) has changed the math. Probably permanently, unfortunately - can't really see the US racing to open up imports of russian ammo even after things settle down.
Actually all Russian ammo plants were sanctioned in late 2021 already, though existing import contracts were honored. So the inexpensive Russian steel cased ammo which served as the price floor for many different cartridges is likely gone forever (for understandable geopolitical reasons).
Also, other shooters will shoot the common rounds like .223, when it's cost goes up or it's unavailable, they move to these other rounds increasing their costs.
I know next to nothing about this, but my guess is because the ammunition factories are busy making the military ammunition.
Because many gun owners own multiple guns. (especially the ones who consume the most ammo) If they're short on ammo to shoot their AR-15 at the range this weekend, they're not going to just sit at home. They'll go to the range and shoot 30-06, .357, 9mm, etc.
Retailers know the score and can preemptively raise prices on their non-NATO rounds before they run out because they know their customers are going to be less price sensitive due to the shortage in NATO alternatives.
(in economic parlance, the different rounds are still "substitute goods" despite not working in the same firearms, so it would actually be pretty surprising if their prices WEREN'T correlated)