The 'why' is easy ... and to some degree, so is the 'why now'.
The factory would be very expensive to reconfigure to meet the new RemArms business. All the plant and machinery is old. The property is expensive to maintain, and so really, they need a new factory. As soon as they start planning, NYS will want to have an environmental impact assessment and they'll find enough metal in the soil from all those years of manufacturing to demand that there's remediation of that problem before one truckload of concrete gets poured. Costs of manufacture will be high. Risk of lawfare even higher than 10 years ago, and the expectation it'll get worse before it gets better.
What has kept them in New York, Ruger in Connecticut, Smith & Wesson (until recently) in Massachusetts is that it was marginally more profitable to run existing plant in those unsatisfactory locations, than biting the bullet and building out new plant. Remember, before it went bust, Remington had already started to move its operations to the south, building out new facilities in Huntsville, AL which may well have been completed if they hadn't run up against union objections and bankruptcy 4 years later.
Colt are still in Hartford, CT (another reason I'm shaking my damn head about the Colt CZ "merger") and I can only imagine it's because the costs of moving out of the new-ish plant up there to somewhere sane is prohibitively high. I'm hoping the pencilnecks in Czechia wake up and realize that they should have just swallowed Colt like they did Dan Wesson and not made the deal look like a merger. I guess the Europeans think it's a quality marque.
The factory would be very expensive to reconfigure to meet the new RemArms business. All the plant and machinery is old. The property is expensive to maintain, and so really, they need a new factory. As soon as they start planning, NYS will want to have an environmental impact assessment and they'll find enough metal in the soil from all those years of manufacturing to demand that there's remediation of that problem before one truckload of concrete gets poured. Costs of manufacture will be high. Risk of lawfare even higher than 10 years ago, and the expectation it'll get worse before it gets better.
What has kept them in New York, Ruger in Connecticut, Smith & Wesson (until recently) in Massachusetts is that it was marginally more profitable to run existing plant in those unsatisfactory locations, than biting the bullet and building out new plant. Remember, before it went bust, Remington had already started to move its operations to the south, building out new facilities in Huntsville, AL which may well have been completed if they hadn't run up against union objections and bankruptcy 4 years later.
Colt are still in Hartford, CT (another reason I'm shaking my damn head about the Colt CZ "merger") and I can only imagine it's because the costs of moving out of the new-ish plant up there to somewhere sane is prohibitively high. I'm hoping the pencilnecks in Czechia wake up and realize that they should have just swallowed Colt like they did Dan Wesson and not made the deal look like a merger. I guess the Europeans think it's a quality marque.
