Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Dan's Sporting Goods - New Addition To My Link List

I am adding a firearms and ammo dealer to my link list under the header: BUY FIREARMS, AMMO, ACCESSORIES & PARTS on the right side of my blog. This may be a bit premature as I usually wait to put up new links for dealers until I have completed at least one transaction with the company, and by completed I mean that I have received the goods, but since I ordered yesterday and they have already shipped my order today, I am doing this post haste.

I ordered a 440 round tin of 7.62x54R ammo from Dan's Sporting Goods (aka: www.dansammo.com), on the first day of the new year. I was somewhat amazed to find anyone with it still in stock but they had it. Surprisingly, I was notified earlier today that the order had already shipped. I put my order in, with Dan's Sporting Goods yesterday at about 1:48 PM. At 1:49 PM, I received an auto-responder email from them confirming the order. Today at 1:06 PM, I received notification from UPS that the package had been shipped and is in transit with an expected delivery date of January 4th.

Wow, that was fast - less than 24 hours from ordering to shipping. Add to that the total price for this ammo was only $94.00 - including shipping - and if you know anything about ammo prices, even those prior to the current ammo buying frenzy with all of its price gouging, you know that this was a very good deal! The last time I ordered this ammo, in the Spring of 2011, I paid $92.14 for 440 rounds and that price was the best around back then. It only has gone up in price since that order. Lately, this stuff (or other very similar milsurp 7.62x54R ammo) has been selling for as high as $179.79 plus shipping. To have it shipped to me would cost an additional $26.69, for a total of $206.48. That for essentially the same thing that only cost me $94.00 at Dan's Sporting Goods. There is a very $112.48 difference in price between the two dealers! The higher price, valid as I wrote this post, was from CheaperThanDirt.com - a business which I no longer patronize due to what I believe is outrageous price gouging on their part; the above price quote is but one example.

With the current firearms and ammunition buying rush and the resultant shortage of many calibers of ammunition, including the one I just mentioned, it flabbergasts me that Dan's Sporting Goods had 440 round tins of this caliber in stock at an excellent price, let alone that they have already processed my order and shipped it. Many, if not most, ammo dealers have been putting up notices on their websites that there will be at least a 5 to 7 day wait (some saying it will be longer) before they can process orders received because they have been swamped with them. Many also have suspended further business by not accepting new orders until further notice; some have gone as far as closing their websites temporarily.

Dan's Sporting Goods, on the other hand, seems to be doing business as it should be getting done and at prices that go a long way toward indicating that whoever runs the business is truly a person or are persons of integrity. Thank you Dan' Sporting Goods.

Then again, maybe it is all a clever government plot to seize firearms. That would be far fetched wouldn't it, the government posing as an ammo dealer - or would it? Yet, while I find this ammo order almost too good to be true, I am keeping my fingers crossed that, on January 4th, it will be the anticipated ammo shipment that shows up at my door and not a team of ultra-ninja ATF, FBI and DHS types looking to seize my guns and ammo.

All the best,
Glenn B

PS: By the way, Dan's Sporting Goods website can be a tad confusing or at least it was for me for a few moments. As I scrolled down the page for ammo, I mistakenly thought that the only items in stock were those that had a highlighted link in the left column which was the ammo descriptiion column. A highlighted link is there only for items that have an accompanying photograph. The trick to knowing what is in stock is to look to the right of the PRICE column (second column) to see if there is a shopping cart in the ADD (or third) column. If so - it is in stock if I understand correctly. That is how it worked for me anyway.