Lately, shopping for .22 Long Rifle cartridges has made me a little nostalgic for the days of yesteryear, when .22 was much cheaper than .40 S&W. The price of a fastfood meal would buy 500 rounds of .22 Long Rifle ammunition, or as we used to call it, a few hours of shooting.
Things have changed! Bricks of .22 LR were going for $80 to $100 each at our last gun show, when you could find them. I thought it was outrageously expensive, until I found it online for $189.99.
If I had only known in the late 1990s how much the under-appreciated .22 LR would be worth today, I’d be rich. Obscenely rich!
Yes, $9.89 was a high retail price for 500 rounds of .22 LR, but the sale prices were good.
UMC .22LR Bicks were $6.99 in the 90s (about 1998)
I wonder if my bank knows how much ammo is stored in their safe deposit boxes now?
6 responses so far ↓
1 Daily Firearms News - Gunmart Blog // Mar 18, 2013 at 8:02 am
[…] Those Were the Days – .22LR Prices Then and Now […]
2 Robert // Apr 22, 2013 at 3:41 pm
Ummm, huge difference between RWS match grade (some of the best in the world) and UMC (some of the not so best in the world). RWS match has always been 3-4x the price of regular 22 ammo. Not to say that prices aren’t insane, but please compare apples to apples. 22lr that can be found (rare), is going for at least 2x what it was 4 months ago.
3 Capitalist Pig // Apr 22, 2013 at 5:17 pm
Here I thought I was comparing apples to apples by showing the RWS RS-50, instead of the cheaper RWS Rifle Match. There are plenty of standard and high velocity bricks for sale for $100-$150 each.
4 Robert // Apr 22, 2013 at 5:57 pm
The biggest question here is WHY the prices went through the roof? And then why on earth someone, especially here in AZ, but really anywhere, would pay 100 bucks for a $17 brick of 22lr? Luckily I’m not hurting for ammo, but I know some are, and it hurts our sport to have sky-high prices. As soon as people stop paying for it, the price will come back down. I lucked out and got 5k of primers, so now I’m stocked for the next year (got 12k total). I’ll wait for ammo and components to come back down, as they will, before buying again. Evil black rifles are becoming available here and there, mags are available, and ammo will come back too.
5 Capitalist Pig // Apr 22, 2013 at 8:24 pm
I assume there are a lot of people with more dollars than sense. Ebay has had Hornady .40 S&W die sets (with shell plate) selling for over $300, instead of in the $60 range, At the last Mesa gun show, the only .22LR was a brick for $80 and a brick for $100, so it isn’t caused just by scalping opportunists. Some of it probably has to do with shops fighting, and paying too much, for inventory. Bruno explained their position here: http://www.greatsataninc.com/fast-good-or-cheap-you-may-not-have-a-choice/27/
Good job being prepared! I don’t have enough powder on hand, but I have plenty of the other components.
6 Randall T. Duncan // Dec 8, 2013 at 10:59 pm
You can’t compare those days with the present one. World is getting smaller day by day. The increased amount thing is not only in the bullets but also in every purchases in our daily life.