tl;dr: why simp for these fuckups? plenty other places sell ammo and get this right.

the deleted comment i was going to reply to was this:

Bait and switch is if they sold you something and delivered something different.

my response was going to be this:

i admit it is not a perfect match of the description but if you read the article perhaps you'll find, as i do, that the practice is similar enough to warrant the colloquial shorthand description of "bait and switch". it is in the spirit of a bait and switch.

First, the merchant "baits" the customer by advertising a product or service at a low price; then when the customer goes to purchase the item, they discover that it is unavailable, and the merchant pressures them instead to purchase a similar but more expensive product ("switching").

the primary difference from the explanation in the wikipedia article and the instances with Velocity Ammo Sales is that Velocity actually SELLS you a product A at price X (the bait), the transaction is completed, then later on you receive a cancellation notice. if you still want to buy product A it is now available at price X+Y (the switch).

we can torture the fishing metaphor further but i don't feel there is much to gain from doing so.

myelf, if i'm being generous and open-minded, i have to wonder what they think they're gaining through this practice. they could have just taken the money and shipped the fucking ammo, and taken their small margin. instead they appear to get greedy, cancel a sale and try to REDO the same sale with a larger margin, which probably works on some people but imo the risk is too great and the /r/gundeals community is too price-sensitive and high-information for that to be broadly successful. instead of the margins they have instead achieved significant ill-will, as we can see in this and other threads. it is this aspect that suggests most strongly that it is incompetence rather than greed that drives this practice.

regarding Velocity Ammo's reputation, if you roll back further there are still the elephants-never-forget folks remaining upset about their alleged price-gouging during covid and the Lake City debacle.

all in all, it makes for enough baggage that i think a significant portion of shoppers here would rather take their travelers' cheques to a competing resort.