Brownells Sells Over Three Years’ Worth of AR Magazines in Under 72 Hours
OutdoorHub Reporters 12.27.12
While the holiday shopping season may be lackluster for most retailers, firearm and ammunition suppliers such as Brownells are seeing unprecedented demand.
According to the company’s user account on the rifle enthusiast forum AR15.com, Brownells has sold roughly 3.5 years worth of 30-round PMAG magazines in a 72-hour period along with “an even greater amount of our Brownells magazines.” In a year with soaring firearm related purchases, not even the industry was fully prepared for the wave of demand that surfaced in December. Following the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut and the potential introduction of stricter gun control legislation, AR-15-related products became the number one priority for many buyers.
Many retailers sold out in days and placed customers on back order, promising that sales will resume once they received new stock.
Here is the full statement on AR-15.com from Pete Brownell, president of Brownells:
I wanted to take a minute to shed some insight on the magazine situation if i can. First of all I wanted to offer an apology for the situation that Pacs and anyone else encountered with magazines being “In-Stock” and Backordered moments later. Cedjunior had it correct, the demand for magazines actually exceeded the ability for the system to keep up with the volume that was being ordered. They way that our website works is that inventory is fed from our ERP system directly into the website in “real-time”. Unfortunately, “real-time” is the amount of time that it takes for the transactions to work both ways. During normal circumstances, it is nearly instant. However, we’ve been receiving orders at such a pace that these transactions have gotten slower. We absolutely apologize again, we definitely don’t want that ever to be your experience.
To shed some more light on the magazine situation at present, it really has been unprecedented in the last 5 days. (Edit – Sorry guys, meant 72 hour period) we sold the “average demand” equivalent of about 3 1/2 years worth of PMAGS, and and an even greater amount of our Brownells magazines. We’re working like crazy to get these orders to you as quickly as possible.
We’re working directly with Magpul daily to forecast out the next couple of months deliveries. Magpul is focusing their efforts on the BLACK magazines, so we’re limiting backorders to only Black for now.
On the Brownells 30 and 20 round magazines, we’re still flowing those into the system daily, and are producing those at 100% capacity as well. We ordered more material yesterday that will allow us to up production again in the coming weeks.
Our apologies for the delays! We’ll keep working as hard as possible to get these going and will keep you updated always. Let us know if we can do anything at all. – Pete Brownell
