If they had a few people buying and pricing guns way above their real value how would you expect anyone in management to know? Sounds like a racket or out right fraud to me. A MBA or 30 years in retail sales does not give you any knowledge in fair market value of used guns so upper management has no clue what is going on at the time. Many well informed people here have different ideas of what value a gun has, not as far off as many example I have seen at Cabela and Bass SemiPro. The only clue that management has that prices are too high is no turnover of stock. It just sits there.
They need either inside checks or pay someone from the outside to look over their inventory and pricing. Each store should have their inventory gone over once or twice a year and be re-evaluated. Could be as simple as having one gun room manager going to another store and do a item by item inventory every six months. Confirm item value and condition. Next time a different manager comes to the same store and does it again. Place five ringer items that are priced well off norm or have major flaws in them to see if inventory is being done properly. Miss more than one and you have to explain why you are being paid.
In house records should already exist as to the purchase price, date of purchase, from whom they bought the gun, etc... . They need to add the source of valuation for retail purposes. This can be the Bluebook, other similar items on the net, recent in store sales of similar items, appraised value and site the source. Prices from out of the sky or drawn out of a hat are not working.
It does a store no good to have items sit and not sell because they are priced too high. Stores need turnover to justify sales space. If these gun rooms remain a dead sales zone they will be closed and that space will be filled with items that are priced to sell. And the closing of any more gun rooms does none of us any good. Question is how do you educate a chain store that they have a problem and make a reasonable suggestion how to correct it to them? Maybe we just need to have one of the bosses read this board and we can give them a hand for a 10% discount on ammo.
