Ever consider selling ammo for a living or a fast buck? Have you ever considered buying and selling ammo as a business? I have. Consider that ammunition has inherent value. It has utility far above currency in a post industrial world. It has an indefinite shelf life. Properly stored ammunition is viable for at least a century. Best yet, it is something I like to have on hand and can turn into a supplemental income at weekend gun shows (which I would be attending anyway). On top of all that, it isn’t regulated by the federal government the way that firearms are. But, could you actually make any money at it? Let’s use 7.62x39 as an example. It can still be bought for ~ $100 per case of 1,000 cartridges, although backlogs may be encountered before delivery. Assuming that you acquire a small starting inventory of a single thousand round case, you could resell each twenty round box at roughly 50% mark up ($3/box). If you sold all fifty boxes, you would have gross sales of $150. After recovering your $100 initial investment you would retain $50 to cover other expenditures such as renting a table at the local gun show ($40 in my area), any additional gasoline involved in transport, and time spent at the show which you would not otherwise have spent there. If you are like me and spend a few hours at a show instead of the full 16 hours that it is open, your time is then valued at less than $1 per hour. So based on this small inventory and initial investment, the chances are good that you will not grow wealthy as an ammo dealer. But you will have had your inventory on hand for free. If having a few thousand rounds of extra ammo on hand helps give you peace of mind in troubled times, it may be worth making the investment. There is also the possibility of expanding your inventory to say: 7.62x39, 308, 303, 30-06, and 7.62x54R. If that is the case and 7.62x39 sales cover the cost of your table and incidentals then sales of the additional cartridges are pure profit after the initial investment is recovered. This leaves the possibility of clearing over $100 per show as honest and true net income. Add in something like 50 BMG which can be bought in bulk for about $1 per cartridge but often retails for twice that much, and you could double that profit if you get sales. Invest $1500 for a thousand of each of the cartridges listed above and manage to sell them all over the course of a several weekend shows, and you will have recovered your operating cost and cleared an additional estimated $1,000 (mostly from the sale of the 50 BMG ammo). Not bad for being somewhere that you like to be anyway and keeping an inventory of things you want to have on hand. Will you get rich? Probably not. But can you have fun and do a little better than break even? Oh yeah!