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tornado wrote:I just signed up for the email updates -- thanks for the tip. I got my Sigma at the RR SW, and the last time I bought carry ammo (last month) I got lucky and was there on a "customer appreciation day" so it was 10% off. The regular price rang up high, so I had to catch that and have them fix it before taking the 10% off.

A box of 25 .40S&W Gold Dot was around $18. Outside of gun shows, where around here would carry ammo be cheaper? Not Wal-Mart.

I generally buy my carry ammo at Cost Plus 10. I think I paid like $14 for a box of 9mm GDHP +P 124gr last time I bought some. It may have been a little more, I can't remember off hand as it has been a while.

So I finally bit the bullet after waiting interminable months for this company to finally get inventory up online (which still hasn't happened, despite the website claiming that it is "coming soon" since at least November), and made a trip up to Round Rock to see what this place was all about. I also was needed to get a hunting license and set up a hunter education course, so it was a good excuse to go.

First, the positives:

The gun counter guys are very friendly and will talk with you in their experiences with particular guns. This impressed me coming from a chain store. They had their inventory readily accessible and would happily hand you anything you wanted to handle and try the trigger on.

The guy at the license counter was helpful and was happy to go and look up course details for me.

Now the negatives:

This store doesn't like to carry affordable anything.

I went over to the carry ammo section to see what was available. I went specifically to find 9mm 124gr. +P GDHP ammo, only to find that they simply didn't carry it. This surprised me, as this seems to be a very common carry round, and is the standard 9mm service round used by many police departments. It's not that they were out... there wasn't even a place on the shelf for it. So I figured that I'd maybe try some federal... but they had nothing in a 124/125gr. +P round. In fact, the only +P round they carried in this weight of bullet was Remington Golden Sabre, which doesn't really seem like an attractive round to me. I went looking for some S&B ammo for both my Mosin-Nagant (7.62x54R) and my PA-63 (9x18). When I failed to find any of these, I looked the shelves over and realized that they don't carry S&B ammo AT ALL.

Disappointed, I went over to look at the reloading section. My disappointment did not end there. I have been preparing to get a Lee Anniversary Kit, so I figured I'd check out what they have. They do not carry Lee reloading equipment at all. The only equipment available was Hornady and RCBS.

I figured I'd at least get a magazine for my Hi-Power, so walked over to the gun counter and asked if they carried the Mec-Gar 15-round flush magazines. They do not. In fact they don't carry Mec-Gar mags at all. This really made no sense to me because Mec-Gar is known to make high-quality mags. Apparently they're not expensive enough for this company to bother selling.

My impression with this place is that they have somewhat of a captive audience in their suburban locations, with customers who either don't want to bother traveling to a real gun shop or don't know any better and buy what's put in front of them. Their prices seem steep, and in many cases are nearly MSRP (such as the Garmin 60Cs GPSr I looked at). While the staff is friendly, the company itself seems intent on only selling items for which they glean a hefty profit margin from ignorant customers. While I will return for my hunter's education course, I'm not going back as a customer.