Just to clear up any confusion on why this is happening, I work part time at a Sportsman's Warehouse in Utah. Basically, what we have been instructed to do is to keep enough ammo to sell 1 box with every gun on the shelf. If we get 3 AR's and 5 bulk boxes of 5.56, then 3 of them go in the back with the AR's so that the guy buying his new gun can actually use his new gun, and the other 2 go on the shelf. Usually, the ammo on the shelf gone within an hour, and the AR's within a day. So it's not like we sit on billions of rounds of ammo and sit and giggle because everyone is running around like chickens with their heads cut off. I can't even get what I need for myself. It's been months since I saw any Hornady Precision Hunter 6.5 Creedmoor factory ammo, let alone any Hybrid 100v for my 7mm rem mag. So it's not like we all save it for ourselves, we just try to make sure the new guy can use his new toy. The guys who work at the stores suffer just like you. We just aren't receiving it. To the guy who says "It's like they are not even expecting or wanting to put ammo back up," we WANT so bad to put it out, but we just don't receive it. And retail/sales 101 is that you never leave a shelf space empty. You fill it with something else, because it's more pleasing to the eye. I completely redo our ammo shelves every week because some weeks we get lots of 30-06 and no 270, then the next week we get 300 win mag and our 30-06 is gone. So we just try to cycle through the space we do have and maximize the shelf space we do have. I would bet most places do the exact same thing.
Also, a word of advice on getting stuff from a storefront retailer. If you come in like vultures looking for and scrambling for everything on order receival day, we wait until you're gone to finish putting the order out on the shelves. Not gonna help the jerk. But if you come in politely and ask respectfully if we have any XXX in the order, most of us will drop what we are doing and go dig for you. I can't tell you how many people I've asked to leave the store because every box I've pulled out of the back they're digging through it faster than I can open it and leaving a mess behind them.