Yay, good boarding.

 

I ordered 2K DG Bullets on 1/26......THEY arrived today.

 

Yes I've heard good things about DG bullets. May try them at some point. I've been shooting Bayou Bullets for several years and love their product.

 

Alright. Obviously Bayou has been swamped. I ordered a case of 135gr 9's and 1000 200gr swc in 45 on 10/15. They shipped yesterday afternoon. I don't need them as I have lots here to load but I want them!

Patience grasshopper! 🦗

Don't feel bad, I live about 15 miles from Bayou Bullets and have been there enough times for pickup so that the owner knows me. I even offered to feed his crew pizzas if I could get a smallish order of 200 .40S&W bullets for my grandson that I'm teaching how to reload. He said I was welcome to bring the pizzas but even if he wanted to fill my order, he couldn't due to the exponential growth of customers recently. They were working almost non-stop at the time, about 6 weeks ago.

 

I wanted to weigh in on this comment of two weeks ago.

On the surface it might seem like a fair and noble stance to take. But.. and there is always a but...

If the comment made somewhere else that this company has over the last year acquired 14,000 new customers is accurate, even if it is inflated double and there are only 7,000 new customers and each customer is buying 100 bullets, that's orders for 70,000 bullets that fell out of the sky. 100 bullets is less than 1% of that amount. It is hard to believe that a company that has a limited catalog of primary product would not have the ability to sell 100 pcs to a customer that is standing right there in-front of an officer of the company. In other words if the loss of less than 1% of a mass produced product were to place the backlog in disarray then there is something amiss here. When a company makes zero commitment of delivery schedules it only makes the stance worse in my opinion.

Sometimes we do things against policy as a good will gesture.
[ON EDIT]: they should have just handed the customer a sample bag N/C and wished him a good day.

[ON EDIT]: The first rule of retail is never ever ever send a customer home empty handed unless you have a exceptionally good reason to do so.

 

Thanks for the update...have an order in the queue since first week in December, so sounds like I am looking at 4-6+ weeks still, minimum.

 

I have an order from the first week of November (15 weeks). They should update the lead time on their website from 12-14 weeks to Never

 

I work btw for a company that manufactures custom transformers, very complicated multi-winding transformers for military and aerospace. We build to fill customer orders, no stocking of parts or materials. The cores we use are generally an 8 week lead time, add 2 weeks for planning so 10-12 weeks before a job hits the production floor. Sometimes longer if the mechanical parts are longer lead or if we have to do a lot of mods in-house. But say 12 weeks before hitting the floor.

In general 6 weeks through the shop--winding, finishing, assembly, potting, marking and so forth with testing between every step and test data at final. All of the materials are inspected before placed into the stock room. There could be 40 or 50 items on the bill of materials, 200 build operations, all along we have to meet ISO and AS9100 standards. No comparison to the handful of operations to make coated lead bullets.

What has me puzzled is handloaders buying case quantities of coated lead bullets are the minority of the minority among firearms users. Granted many of us have available supplies and are buying for the future but still all of these bullets makers with outrageous long lead times and in the case of Bayou (and I'm sure others) getting paid at time of order placement and to be 4 months+ out? I have been buying bullets in quantity from Bayou for years and yet I pay at order placement.

As individuals we talk and plan about being prepared for the ebb and flow of circumstances and political whim and yet the firearms industry overall is borderline dysfunctional on this front. It seems to never be prepared for what we clearly see over on the horizon. I wanted to buy an aftermarket part for a G34. To make the order worth the effort I added three (10 round) magazines. The retailer I'm using specialized in Glock, 4 weeks waiting for the magazines, have no idea when, while Midway has them in stock the whole time. It's me buying in anticipation not necessity but how can the industry overall be this tone deaf? Of course we all have our stories.

 

Good post. I can't comment on Bayou, but I average 2 to 3 firearm or reloading related orders a month and it's impossible to miss the fact customer service overall has gone in the toilet. The plague has provided a handy excuse for crappy customer service. And assuming your order actually is in stock and gets shipped, the post office is liable to send it anywhere or lose it all together.

I'm getting real selective about where I order accessories and reloading stuff from. Took a while, but I finally settled on a couple of cast/coated bullet suppliers* that have been really good about top quality bullets at a decent price and shipped in a timely manner.

* somebody is bound to ask, so Maplewood bullets and Bear Creek.

 

I am going to try bayou once the backlog is over.

 

I had been shooting Bayous but they got so far behind, I looked around.
Brazos offers the same molds and the same coating, the first batch I got from them did as well as Bayous.
So I ordered some more with expectation of getting them by the end of this month.
Then the Valentine Blizzard struck and they were idled. Who knows how long it will take them to get back in action.

 

You will know very soon if they are interested in having you become a loyal customer. An old saying is "problems are opportunities in disguise"

 

My experience is that these guys run the same configuration for many days in a row to meet the backlog. If they need 10M 115gr 9mm bullets then that is all they run until those 10M are made. They probably only run .40 one day a month at best. So if you just show up they aren't going to switch over to .40 for a few bullets.

 

In any manufacturing organization, there will be some rejects. To keep the rejects from causing the entire operation to shut down, a manufacturing organization will plan for some shrinkage. For something simple and low tech like coated bullets, I would guess that the shrinkage would be at least 3% and should be much higher.

Even 1% of 10 million would be a lot of bullets. I cannot imagine that there wouldn't be at least a few thousand of any catalog offering available for contingency purposes. Look at it this way, if a shipment is made of several thousand pcs and they are lost in transit or are not to spec., would the customer be forced in every occasion to wait another 12-14 weeks for a replacement?

[EDIT] In practical terms, if a manufacturing organization sets up and runs a large batch, say 10 million pcs., some of the orders should be filled early, very early, and some will be at the stated lead time. It makes sense that production lots would be based on economy and\or convenience. I have no idea what is involved in tear down and set up a machine to run a particular bullet on the particular machines used but I seriously doubt it is a week long multiple person project.

 

Well at least Precision is not actually taking the customers payment months before shipping. Bayou wants us to pat them on the back for not raising prices. It is easy to keep prices down when you have paid for the item 18+ weeks earlier. It actually would be kind of awkward for them to raise prices on previously placed orders already paid for. Sikorsky can assemble a helicopter faster than some of these places can make coated lead bullets.

 

I ordered a few cases of bullets from both Gallant and Bayou in November. Nothing yet.

Its ok though. These bullets wont be needed for a long time. I try to order stuff 2-3 years in advance.

Load one, order three.

 

Miraculous things are happening at Bayou...just got a shipping notice that my December 7 (20 weeks ago) order shipped today, so those in the queue can gauge how much longer your wait is...and may the odds be ever in your favor.

 

Well that's good news. My oldest order is from 14 Jan so I'm getting close.

For you, a date which will live in infamy.

 

You guys get high marks for patience. I would have gotten a refund/kicked them to the curb months ago.

 

Refund would be desirable, but all sales are final.

 

Black Bullets International is still shipping within a couple of days. My last order was placed on Tuesday and delivered on Thursday.

 

Demand is so strong they don't "need" to answer phones or email....

 

This is true, unfortunately short sighted.

 

Ordered first week of January 2021. Ive bought Bullets all over the internet with no more than a week wait. I go to Bayou and the purchase buttons are still active. At the time of my order it was 8-12 weeks. I tried to contact from website contact and email but no responses, I tried to call no response, so I filed for refund via PayPal last week awaiting their response now. I’ve been patient and if they have 13,000 orders they shouldn’t be taking peoples monies until they are caught up. Buy elsewhere, it’s available.

 

Agreed. Again, not in a rush, but this is poor company management. Never again from this company if they can’t manage their load properly.

 

I ordered on December 12th and I just received a notice that my order just shipped!
Toolfreak