Tag Archives: news

Cheaper Than Dirt called out for price gouging

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It was brought to my attention in comments that CTD, home of the $100 Pmag, has been called to the carpet by the Texas AG for price gouging to the tune of having to refund $400k to customers.

Some linkage:

https://www.star-telegram.com/news/coronavirus/article242031861.html

BREAKING: Texas AG Accuses Cheaper Than Dirt of Price Gouging

I have razzed CTD for years for their computerized algorithm that raises prices to slow demand as inventory dwindles. Succinctly, as inventory levels go down, the automatic pricing raises the price to slow down the sales of inventory. The idea being that you slow down the sales of inventory so that you’ll get restocked before you run out of stuff. Problem is, in a panic buying situation the inventory is flying off the shelf so fast, and the next resupply is uncertain, that the price keeps going up up up….thats how you get $99 Pmags.

However, you also get them when someone just arbitrarily says “Quadruple the price of everything.”

Regardless, CTD just took a hit to their reputation that is going to be legendary in the gun community for years to come. I expect them to either make a statement denying the charges and saying they settled for $400k to avoid more costly  litigation..or…I expect the to say nothing in hopes it all blows over.

Regardless, for those of you who never saw the earlier times CTD dropped its pants and bent the consumer over……….

ETA: I almost forgot to mention, CTD has also, during times of panic, cancelled existing orders that were already made forcing the would-be purchaser to either renew the order at the new higher prices or go elsewhere. Classy.

Article – Americans Are Frantically Buying Military Gear Before the Election

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Conflict is on America’s streets in 2020, and “tactical apparel” has become a lifestyle industry serving militarized law-enforcement agents and the freelance gunmen who emulate them. Less than two weeks before Election Day, orders are rolling in. Since last year, online purchases have driven a 20-fold jump in sales of goods like the $220 CM-6M gas mask — resistant to bean-bag rounds — for Mira Safety of Austin, Texas. “It doesn’t matter who gets elected,” founder Roman Zrazhevskiy said of his new customers. “They think that no matter who wins, Biden or Trump, there are going to be people who are upset about the result.” Not long ago — perhaps a generation — dressing like you’re going to war was for the veteran who never quite made it back from Vietnam or the angry young men who obsessed over gas masks and combat boots at the military surplus store. (Every American town seemed to have one, and only one.)

I have to snicker because there really should be a distinction here and it is completely missed in the article – people buying the gear now are interesting, but not as interesting as the ones who already bought it long before this happened.

Rioting? Sure. In places like NY, California, Chicago, various parts of the south. But a nationwide blood-in-the-streets uprising like you see in the Middle East everytime some dictator gets out-dictated? ‘Technical’ pickup trucks? No..not a chance.
I suspect that with all these articles about ‘Americans preparing for anarchy’ might morph into a self-licking ice cream cone. Really, such a circumstance is the sort of thing media types salivate over so it seems it wouldbe in their interest to instigate/foster/encourage such chaos.
I think that in three weeks we’re gonna see that this whole thing, no matter who wins, was not the ‘Purge’-like event that people were forecasting.

Article – U.S. gun sales soar amid pandemic, social unrest, election fears

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Oct 15 (Reuters) – Andreyah Garland, a 44-year-old single mother of three daughters, bought a shotgun in May for protection in the quaint middle-class town of Fishkill, New York. She joined a new and fast-growing local gun club to learn how to shoot.

She has since applied for a pistol permit and constantly hunts for increasingly scarce ammunition – making three trips weekly to a local Walmart. “They’re always out,” she said.

Like legions of other first-time buyers who are contributing to record sales for the U.S. gun industry this year, Garland’s decision to take up arms is driven in part by disturbing news about the coronavirus pandemic, social unrest over police killings of Black people and a potentially contested election that many fear could spark violence.

“With everything going on around us,” she said, “you see a need.”

Don’t kid yourself….the need has always been there.

When Y2K fizzled into a nothingburger there was speculation that yard sales that spring would be a treasure trove of NIB generators, storage food, etc. Personally, I never saw it (at least not until years later) but it seems likely.

I wonder if in a year or two we’ll see a surge of pumpguns and 9mm pistols on the market as people get rid of that thing they bought in 2020, never used, and ‘just want it out of the house’. Buying opportunities may be coming.

Personally, I’m at the stage where an unfortunate rifle squad that lost their gear in a boating accident could completely re-arm themselves from me.

Article – UK supermarkets … are rationing toilet paper and hand sanitizer as fears of panic buying return.

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British grocery chains Tesco and Morrisons have started rationing essential items over fears that stricter lockdown measures will send shoppers into a panic. 

Supermarkets limited sales of certain goods earlier in the pandemic, and Morrisons became the first major grocer to reintroduce these measures when it said on Thursday that customers could only buy three of certain products. These included pasta, soup, hand wash, and hand sanitizer, as well as multipacks of toilet paper and kitchen roll.

I’m a bit perplexed that anyone could have had the experience of standing in line for rationed toilet paper (in the classic Soviet model) and not learned a lesson that would preclude them from getting caught up in another round of rationing. But, people are idiots. There’s such a strong normalcy bias that “oh, that’ll never happen” even though it just freakin’ happened. Thats not willful ignorance, it’s just genuine shorsightedness (which is a polite term for ‘stupidity’). I can’t say that I’ve accounted for 100% of my anticipated needs but I’m so far ahead of the general population that if some sort of rationing did kick in, or anothe shortage reared its head, I’d probably not even notice.

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About five weeks until the election. Part of me has that same morbid, detached fascination that exists when you watch a horrific car accident on video…you know something terrible is about to occur, is occurring, but you kinda want to see it happen.

I used to have a friend who believed that we should vote Communists into office so we could just skip the foreplay and get the war started.Definitely an interesting outlook.

I disagree. I’m the most optimistic survivalist that youre ever going to meet. I mean that in the sense that my ‘perfect apocalypse’ is the one that doesn’t happen. If I die peacefully, warm, and well fed with a basement full of food,ammo, and fuel that was never needed…..I call it a triumph.  If you really have a secret desire to live out the Mad Max lifestyle with your gear and your buddies go live in Somalia, Afghanistan, or Detroit. You can LARP Mad Max all day long in those environs and you may find that it isn’t the glorious rugged-individualist fantasy camp that you thought it was.

Why would I want to spend a single day having to crap into a plastic bucket, eat freeze drieds, shoot looters, sleep under a poncho, and drink bleach-flavored water if I didn’t have to?

But just because you don’t want to do something doesn’t mean you’re not going to have to. So…big basement of goodies.

Article – Armed Neighborhood Groups Form In The Absence Of Police Protection

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Somebody was nice enough to send me an email with a link to this article. Much thanks.

Cesia Baires knocks on the three apartment doors above her restaurant and a neighboring taqueria just before curfew.

A woman opens the door. Her two young children are inside.

“Remember,” she says to them in Spanish. “Same thing as yesterday. I’m going to come check on you. If there’s anything you guys need, give us a call right away.”

Meanwhile, a few men climb through the window and on to the roof to set up semi-automatic weapons as the curfew begins in Minneapolis. It’s something Baires never thought she would have to do as a small-business owner, but then she found out these apartments were occupied.

“Material things we can replace, that’s true,” she says. “But there are families up here. These aren’t empty buildings.”

I’m a little annoyed at the use of the term ‘vigilante’. which is clearly not what is going on here. But…its NPR so thats about par for the course.

Wardrobe malfunction

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Apparently a large part of my summer ensemble can now be interpreted as making a political statement that is unpopular in some quarters….

Men wearing Hawaiian shirts and carrying guns add a volatile new element to protests

Wondering why so many heavily armed white guys are rocking hibiscus print?

I like Hawaiin shirts for three reasons:

  • Shock value – the ugly the better. I like stuff where people look at it and go “I can’t believe youre wearing that”
  • Utlity – Awesome for covering a holster in summer carry
  • Comfort – When its hot out, these things are darn comfy

Favorite? Hilo Hatties. Someone introduced me to these years ago and I like ’em alot.

Is the rooftop speaking Korean yet?

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2020 is really turning out to be something, isn’t it? Who knew?

I’m still trying to keep my focus and work my way down the list of things I want to make sure I have plenty of on-hand. Interestingly, one of the things I keep on hand is a pretty decent supply of rubber buckshot and rubber slugs.

Watching the various riots is proving interesting. No one seems to be wanting to go full Rodney King Riots… I see lotsa crowds waving celphones but very few molotov cocktails, and I see lotsa cops with pepperball guns and very few people actually shooting real bullets. It’s like neither side wants to really commit.

Oh sure, there are exceptions…but broadly speaking it looks like the looters are doing just enough to avoid getting shot and the cops are throwing around just enough weight to avoid using real ammo.

For me, this is all pointless. I live in a place that is rather…mmmm….homogenous. And that tends to trend toward less crime and violence. There’ll be some college kids who think they’re “allies” or somesuch and may wave some banners or something….but a half dozen guys in black bandanas breaking windows? Someone asked me if it was time to tuck a carbine behind the drivers seat ‘just in case’. My opinion was ‘no’. Just do like you normally do and carry a pistol and, for here, you’re probably just fine.

However, if I lived somewhere else where this sorta stuff was happening….totally different story.

Interesting times

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I don’t remember ordering up a burgeoning race war.

I’m not going to say that I’m not a conspiracy guy, but I don’t think I’m a tinfoil hat wearer either. But, when someone says “oh, thats just crazy talk…you know how those people are” I get curious and want to examine things for myself. :::shrug::: I’m a very inquisitive person.

The prevailing conspiracy theories out there are that, since this is an election year, there needs to be a significant amount of sturm and drang to sink any hope of the President getting re-elected. Does that mean that I think ‘They’ created a virus and released it to sink an election? Does that mean I think they got a buncha cops to kill a black guy on camera? No, I don’t. But what I do think is that there are factions that “don’t let a crisis go to waste” and, perhaps, exploit these events more than they normally would have if someone else were President.

I’ll bet this is the sort of thing that comes in threes…. there’s some other crisis out there, I’m sure, just waiting to get tagged as We Warned You That He Would Cause This. China? Earthquake? Mass Shooting? Your guess is as good as mine. We shall see.

Article – America’s meat shortage is more serious than your missing hamburgers

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If you go to Wendy’s this week, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to get a hamburger. Go to the supermarket and you’ll probably see some empty shelves in the meat section. You may also be restricted to buying one or two packs of whatever’s available. Try not to look at the prices. They’re almost definitely higher than what you’re used to.

This is the new reality: an America where beef, chicken, and pork are not quite as abundant or affordable as they were even a month ago.

One of the far-downstream  consequences of the Current Situation that probably not too many people thought about when this started. My habit of cruising the remaindered meat aisle and freezing any good deals I find should serve me well. But, honestly, if meat costs a little more…so what? It’s not a problem for me. And, really, this is true of everything. No matter what it is…from caviar to plutonium to machine guns…it’s always available, it’s just expensive. If beef jumps a dollar a pound..:::shrug::: I can deal with it.

Of course, prices go up when supply is low. I can adjust. It’s when the product is completely unavailable…thats the problem. I’ve got a pretty goodly supply of animal flesh sitting in the freezer but thats very much an ‘eggs in one basket’ kind of thing. That freezer craps out on me, I lose a good 85% or so of mt supply of meat. Oh, I have the resources on hand to can it all if something like that happened, but I think that perhaps having more than one freezer should be the way to go. I’ve the generator to run them in case of a power failure, and should the power failure last longer than my generator can support, that still buys me time to can it all.

I’d been picking up more canned meats from CostCo these last two months….chicken and beef mostly. I’ve talked about the CostCo canned roast beef before and I highly recommend it. Canned chicken is canned chicken…it’s all pretty much the same. In addition to the canned meats I’ve a couple cases of Mountain House freeze dried pork chops, diced chicken, diced beef, and ground beef. And, yes, I am aware of canned bacon but I’m just not a huge bacon guy…I like bacon, but I can live without it.

Being the jaded survivalist, I wonder how much of this meat panic is genuine and how much of it is a self-fulfilling prophecy brought about by the media. Thus far, for me, in my locale, I haven’t seen any real change in pricing or availability but then again perhaps it takes a while for these effects to trickle down to flyover country. I’ll continue to buy my meat trays once a week and just keep working the vacuum sealer. A full freezer is never a bad idea, really, anyway.

Article – Ranks of Absent U.S. Food Inspectors Swell on Virus, Union Says

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Well, normally I take anything a union says with a big grain of salt. Add in another heaping tablespoon for it coming from Bloomberg. But…it makes sense.
As I pointed out to someone in comments earlier, most people just looked at the immediate consequences of this pandemic (“I might get sick”) and many fewer looked at the downstream consequences (“The guy who fixes my car might get sick and I need to have work done on it.”, “The guy who delivers the food to the market might call in sick”, “I may not be able to schedule that root canal in two weeks”, etc.)
Meat inspectors? Sure. Probably the same for vehicle inspectors, air safety inspectors, engineering inspectors, etc. (Which might underscore that perhaps we have too many inspections required in our everyday lives.) Occupancy permit for your new addition on your house? City inspector isn’t coming out. Vehicle inspection so you can renew your tags? Most garages are at half staff and have huge waiting lists. You get the idea.
All of this, though, is completely predictable if you think far enough out. What is it that you cannot do yourself and will bottleneck things if the person who does it is unavailable? Thats the question. The answer, of course, is to have a workaround in place…could be stockpiled materials, alternate vendors, DIY, or a Plan B to make do until later.
And, maybe, it’s a good idea to make sure the freezer is topped off. Just in case.