SayUncle has a few things to say about an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispach, decrying Lucky Gunner, LLC for essentially being what’s called a “virtual company,” acting like it’s some kind of stealth and shady operation rather than just a smart business. It’s quick becoming a trend in Biotech as well, and, in fact, I had considered trying to help start such a company if we could practically do it (and we couldn’t, but not because the virtual model couldn’t work).
Why run your own warehousing and logistics services if you can hire someone who specializes in that to do it for you more efficiently than you could yourself? I guess if you’re in the gun industry, new business models are out of the question, lest you attract the attention of reporters who think they’ve got something on you. It’s amazing how much of the firearms industry our opponents want to leave stuck in the 1950s.
Thats because the new business model makes it more available to you, I and of course the ones the anti-gun lobby doesn’t want armed… the poor and lower middle class.
All that and Lucky Gunner is still asking $1/round for 9mm.
Remember, this is a newspaper writing about business models. Newspapers have the worst possible business model and it shows.
Could it be stuck because of the current state of metal-carving technology they use? There’s a huge and dominant investment in fairly heavy equipment: lathes and milling machines and bar-stock and cleaning tanks, and that requires a lot of logistics to move-around very easily. Even CNC machines are not lightweight or small – and many of the operators are perhaps similarly likeminded and married to old iron.
The article invested a lot of time and space in making it sound like they’d put a lot of time and effort into tracking down the company when … they really didn’t. They made some calls, stopped in a few places. All because management isn’t located in the same place as the warehouse. Is that really all they’re complaining about? Then they throw in that little tidbit about the church shooting–which had nothing to do with online ammo sales at all. And ammo companies should be held accountable? Are gas stations held accountable when drunk drivers kill someone?
The whole thing is idiotic and amateurish.
Isn’t the Amazon.com model the same? Where is their gigantic warehouse they were looking for a few years ago? They contract out to other sellers to deliver the goods. In a free society it might be Amazon.com selling everything Lucky Gunner is selling
“Are gas stations held accountable when drunk drivers kill someone?”
Oh, give them a bit. If it would “get people out of their cars and into mass transit,” that would be the law of the land tomorrow. Mass transit, that holy grail of people control, and the other half of the people control the gun control advocates want. Not only is it hard to say “no” if you’re smaller, weaker, older, sicker, it’s hard to say “no” by voting with your feet when you can’t pack up your stuff and move when you want to.
“The whole thing is idiotic and amateurish.”
The idiotic and amateurish fellow travelers are. The process and the people who dreamed it up and are selling it to the idiots are, sadly, not idiotic and amateurish.
If I’m understanding things correctly, you’ve got it backwards: Amazon is highly efficient at running retail warehousing operations, so much so they are reselling excess capacity to others. So you could run a “virtual corporation” as an online retailer by using Amazon to run the logistics, and even all of the front end if you don’t mind potentially sharing the spotlight (“Sold by xxx and Fulfilled by Amazon”).
As for people control: Seeing Like a State…
And it’s hard to vote with your feet when the #Occutards have rioted out *onto* the freeway (Oakland 880 last night) and under some pretext of “outrage” stopped traffic. We’re moving anyhow and like the Internet we route around the freedom-controllers.
See, the problem there is the foolish laws that give pedestrians the right of way on a highway.
Actually, lots of gun bloggers were very down on LuckyGunner for the same reason, a couple years ago.
They believe their business model to be dishonest.
Frankly, I think they’re ignorant and silly for feeling this way, and writing critically because of it.
I don’t get the “dishonest” bit. I know very little about how any company I buy from is structured. I go on LuckyGunner, they have the ammo I want, I buy it, it arrives at my house. The company does what it promises to do. Whether or not its management and warehousing is in the same location matters … how, exactly? Most companies off-sites and/or outsources something (shipping, IT, payroll, legal, food services). Many companies rely almost solely on internet sales. You don’t think they actually have their website hosted on-premises on servers they own? Look out–they’re being dishonest!
Anyone making this sort of argument ought to be laughed out of the room.
The “dishonesty” had nothing to do with how they ran retail operations.
It was that they were running parallel branding efforts, making LuckyGunner look like a half-dozen different (and wholly independant) companies, so when comparing companies you were often (unknowingly) comparing LuckyGunner to itself.
I wouldn’t exactly call that “dishonesty”, either — but they were gaming the search engines and increasing the odds that you would end up buying from them rather than a true competitor.
1950’s? I think you transposed a digit from 1590’s… but, then again, my harquebus has a shoulder thing that doth go up.