Thoughts on Ammo Prices Today

Ammo prices today make shooters grit their teeth. Not just the scalper prices we saw after the “big push for ‘gun control’” that followed the school shooting atrocity at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December of 2012, when shooters lined up outside Walmart at 6 AM in hopes of an ammo delivery and the chance to purchase their rationed two boxes of ammo.  Not even the “dollar a round for 9mm ball” that we sometimes saw three years ago at the height of the Covid pandemic. I’m talking about everyday ammo purchases in the here and now.

Yes, I remember that a quarter century ago we could buy 100 rounds of Winchester White Box 9mm for $10 at the big box store. But we have to consider inflation.

Let’s look at the Consumer Price Index (CPI), where we find: “$1,073 in 1978 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $5,030.77 today, an increase of $3,957.77 over 45 years. The dollar had an average inflation rate of 3.49% per year between 1978 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 368.85%.

“This means that today’s prices are 4.69 times as high as average prices since 1978, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index. A dollar today only buys 21.329% of what it could buy back then.”

In some key areas, prices have increased as much as tenfold. Let’s go back 45 years, to 1978, for comparisons. In the booklet “Back In The Day, 1978” we find that gasoline averaged $0.63 a gallon in that year. In 2023, I’ve seen it over $5 a gallon in places like Chicago and Seattle, and the national average is approaching $4 a gallon at this writing. The average home price in ‘78 was $55,700; the average new car price was $6,379; a first-class postage stamp was $0.15; and the average annual income was $17,640.

The 1978 Gun Digest listed a blue steel Colt Government Model pistol at $234.95, and a Colt Python revolver at $349.95. Colt 1911s now start at around $1,000 and their new iteration of the Python at $1,500. But, hey, we’re talking about ammo prices instead of gun prices, so…

The Most Popular Calibers

The most popular centerfire calibers today are .223 Remington for rifles and 9mm Luger for handguns. Let’s go back to that 1978 Gun Digest, which at that time published then-current ammo prices along with bullet weight, velocity, and energy figures in its ballistic tables.

45 years ago, according to that source, a 20-round box of 55-grain full metal jacket .223 Remington ammunition sold for $6.45.

On the MidGuns.com website in late August 2023, Browning brand 55-grain full metal jacket .223 ammo was for sale at $8.49 for a box of 20. According to the CPI’s 4.69X inflation rate, that box should have cost $30.25.

And now, for the best inflation-busting ammo deal of all. In 1978 Gun Digest listed the price of a 50-round box of 9mm was $11.75 for 116 grain (sic) full metal jacket and $12.00 for 124 grain ball.

August 2023 found the MidGuns site offering 115-grain MagTech and 124-grain CCI Blazer Brass 9mm ball for …$11.99 per 50-round box! By the CPI standard of inflation that would be 4.69 times cheaper today!

And people wonder why 9mm pistols (and carbines, and even revolvers) are so popular now. Yes, there are other reasons…but economy of ammo acquisition is a big part of it, too. In turn, that very popularity helps bring down prices with economy of scale at the ammo factories. It’s sort of a yin-yang thing.

In the fourth quarter of the 20th Century, PMC ammo from South Korea undersold American brands here and became hugely popular, spurring our native ammo makers to bring out competing low-priced lines: CCI’s aluminum-cased Blazer and the subsequent Blazer Brass, Federal’s American Eagle and Champion, Remington’s “Rem-UMC,” and Winchester’s white box USA line.

In short, we got spoiled.

Our ammo prices today in most, if not all, calibers are pretty darn good compared to how inflation has hit other consumer goods, and with 9mm, we are literally paying 1978 prices with much less valuable 2023 dollars.