Just for the record, target loads at personal defense distances (meaning, distances inside your home) should be pretty darn devastating. You don't NEED slugs or buckshot at 7 yds. Now, you do for distances that are greater, but I wouldn't want to be trying to convince any courts I HAD to shoot someone 25 yds away from me.

Regarding prices... yeah, this is worse than the Clinton AWB period. We've seen 3 big spikes in the past year, each time kicking prices up and lowering availability.

1st was Covid, during the toilet paper and Lysol/rubbing alcohol run. That's when the prices moved, and availability got sketchy. If you knew how, you could still get decent prices; and at that point I did top off the tanks. I was even able to add new calibers and firearms to the mix, for what wasn't terrible prices at any point. I was able to find brass 9mm for 20 cts a rd, steel was 16 cents, brass 556 was 37 cents, steel was 25 cents.

Covid run was settling down, ammo that was backordered was shipping, and prices and availability were catching up... and the riots started. That was the 2nd spike, and it was when 9mm jumped to over 60 cents a rd and kept trickling upwards, if you could ever find it.
That was the point where any "normal deals" ended for any mainstream caliber.
At this point, watching the insanity develop, I got creative. I have a couple surplus handguns that run common 9x19 Luger ammo; but they initially had been designed to run something else. In both cases, the only requirement to change calibers was to swap the barrels out. I was able to locate those barrels for reasonable (about $60 apiece), and then- the other, more obscure caliber ammo was still cheaper than current 9mm prices. I scooped up what I could of that, before others got the same idea.
Just a little insurance, I guess.

3rd spike seems to be happening now, and is election-based. As noted, 9mm or 223 is running a dollar a rd or more.

People are scared, and it's unclear how much they are.

You can't discuss this online too much- on popular gun forums, site administrators were killing threads left and right for any discussion of the shortages. That seemed a bit draconian, until you realize why- as when arf.com got shut down by their cloud servers.
Everything seems to funnel through Amazon, Microsoft and Google servers, and if you "violate their conditions", they can drop your website.

So nobody was allowed to even discuss Biden's plans regarding gun control, for example. If you did, you were putting the whole forum in jeopardy.