Hey Dee,
I would be interested in your opinion on this, since you are a gunsmith. Having done corporate work for FedEX for many many years, I got this idea, because people in modern society are willing to pay big bucks for speed. They recognize speed as value.
In Memphis, there is a very well known gunshop, where they have 3 gunsmiths that do complicated and high end work. They are located "Out East" which is the ritzy surburban part of town. They always have more business than they can do, and they generally take 3 to 6 months, or longer, to do anything. When you ask for complicated work, I can understand why it would take a long time.
At any rate, the main problem is that if you need something fairly simple done, such as a recoil pad installed, or a barrel cut and crowned, or an action drilled and tapped, or a set of iron sights mounted, or a stock shortened, etc., they take 3 to 6 months to do that as well! Ridiculous.
I often thought that if someone opened a small gunshop across the street, and advertised Quick Basic Gunsmithing Only, he could make a good living. (I.e., "Gunsmith Express") He could pick the 5 or 10 easiest/most common requests, limit his business strictly to that, and advertise one, two or three day turn-arounds, depending on how much somebody would want to pay. (IThe quicker the turn around, the more it would cost.) People are disgusted with having to wait for their simple work to be done at the high end place, and would quickly start coming to the new place.
And, if the work got to be too much for the new smith, there are lots of young smiths around with no shops, who are very competent to do simple jobs, who would love to work 3 hours or so in the evenings, at $20 an hour or so.
And do you now what else? In Memphis, at the end of dove season and duck season, lots of the upper end suburban hunters walk into the expensive shop, plop their shotguns down in their padded cases, and say "Hey, how much to clean and lube this for me." Current price at the expensive shop: $65 bucks.
Well, just my thoughts. And I would say this, once at a big skeet tournement, there was a guy with a trailer who did custom stock work. My wife wanted the stock of her Citori shortened by one and a half inches, and a good Pachymer pad put on it. This guy had everything he need in that trailer. He did the entire job, while we watched, in about 30 minutes. It was a beautiful job. His charge was $95.00, plus the price of the pad. We gladly paid it.
Best,
Mannyrock
