Originally posted by lasersailor184
I'd be more inclined to think that it is a shifting market that did Winchester in, not anything else. Recently, more and more plastic guns are being designed and sold. Their popularity and amount will act as the opposite to the popularity and amount of the old classics.
It's not just plastic guns. Winchester competes against a variety of foreign manufacturers and two or three VERY EFFICIENT US manufacturers--Savage, Marlin, Remington and Ruger, to name a few. The quality of their product has suffered as their equipment has aged, and they have refused to modernize their facility. When outfits like Kimber (makes rifles using modern equipment) and others can produce a higher quality piece at a lower cost, the writing is on the wall.
Winchester priced their "savior" shotgun (the x-2) at the same price point as a berretta, but it wasn't as good as a berretta or even a remington.
There seems to be two ways to make money in the gun business--use overseas cheap labor, hand fitting, and old machinery to make a good quality product, or use modern machining centers to eliminate hand fitting to make a good product. Using old equipment and expensive domestic labor to make a good product won't survive.
