Technically this is a rumor since we don’t have confirmation yet. But through a very good source, TTAG has learned that Remington notified all of Advanced Armament Corp’s employees today that their jobs have been terminated. Word is that all AAC production will be moved to Kentucky (Big Green has operations in both Hickory and Elizabethtown) after the end of the year. It doesn’t appear that anyone has been offered a position once the move is made, though an offer of a three week severance payment was proffered to employees who stick it out through December 31. We’re trying to reach someone at AAC for confirmation, but the plan seems to be to save cash by deep-sixing everyone left at AAC who has any knowledge of and expertise in their products. How’d that work out for Marlin?
UPDATE: Our man Leghorn just happened to by driving through Georgia today, so we re-tasked him to stop by AAC’s Lawrenceville headquarters . . .
where he was told that the company has no official statement at this time. He was also told that anyone who could tell him anything official is in “emergency meetings” all day. The scuttlebutt around the AAC office is that Remington may leave a small office for AAC’s top brass in Georgia, but that hasn’t been determined yet. Continue to watch this space.
Unfortunately, given past decisions by the Freedom Group management, this rumor is distressingly plausible.
I would agree, it doesn’t take much for me to believe a plausible Remington/FG rumor these days when it sounds like this.
Anyone interested in a brand new, never been threaded on, or a round shot through them AAC Cyclone, and Element 2 suppressor?
All NFA rules apply………
You lost me at “all NFA rules apply”
Wow… talk about destroying a brand… make that brand after brand after brand.
Now if only they would try to make a bad business decision, then they would actually make a good one.
I just ordered a 300blk barrel. It shipped yesterday. Glad it got out before the hatchet fell.
Mike Mers of AAC says “This is NOT true”:
http://www.silencertalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=888481#p888481
This is May, that was April.
The original post also said that AAC brand would be killed.
However this is just saying they’ve all been fired, which is something totally different all together.
So I guess we’ll have to wait and see what will happen.
Whoops, excellent catch – same story, different day it seems.
With all of the odd news and rumors coming from AAC over the past year or so it makes me sorry I went the AAC route for so many of my suppressors.
The brand has been destroyed, but at least the (competent) staff will be snapped up by companies who are really interested in producing these components. For the past few years, innovation at AAC has been suppressed [pun deliberate] by ownership. Now, as usual, it can resume elsewhere.
Anyone else remember how Xerox never bothered developing the GUI, the mouse, PDF, the laser printer…?
But better mousetraps have a way of bubbling up to the top of the heap.
Apropos: http://dev.thetruthaboutguns.com/2014/02/daniel-zimmerman/sig-sauer-hires-kevin-brittingham/
“For the past few years, innovation at AAC has been suppressed [pun deliberate] by ownership”
That is not true at all. More time was spent on testing and verification to make the products rock solid.
Did Remington fire the employees of Marlin when they took over? I have heard different rumors as to why Marlins quality went down the drain after Rem took over. From firing employees to broken machines during a move..I know nothing of inside the industry, so I was always curious. Curious about this too, since I will be buying AAC products soon.
According to one of the insiders that I know, the problem with Marlin was that the components were built on antiquated equipment and the old-timers who knew how to “kick the machines in the right places” did not move to the new facility. Supposedly, Marlin misled them in regards to the condition of the machines. Either way, they could not get good product out because no one knew how to manipulate the kinks in the machines.
That’s true in many older gun companies and production machine shops. Machines wear and get worn. Experienced operators can still get them to produce in-spec parts, but there is a intimate relationship between the machine and the operator.
Old machinists are able to hit their sizes on worn-out equipment all the time, whereas noobs might hit a size only by luck.
Investment Bankers and MBA’s, however, think that there’s no reason to pay for experience, so they get rid of the experience, hire three idiots paid minimum wage and try to wire the three stooges together to get the net result of one old-timer. This, in my experience, never works.
But hey, Harvard Business School says this is “smart management,” so you see it done all over American industry.
inb4 Sig Sauer hires them all
i’m all for sig taking over the 300 popularity. at least there would be products on the shelves
Get your AAC products now. Once they move under Big Green’s roof, they’ll end up total shit, just as with the others.
Remington’s (FG) purchase of AAC was the exact reason I did not even look at them when I was shopping around for a new 7.62 suppressor. Same for the next Rem 700 platform I build, I will get my action from a smaller custom shop that makes their own actions.
You gotta hand it to Freedom Group, they don’t give up. It is like somebody driving on the sidewalk and instead of stopping when the car is beaten up by all the bodies, they attach a plow on the front and speed up.
A morbid analogy, sure, but still fitting.
I think the better analogy would be that they’ve been driving on the sidewalk a long time and somehow haven’t hit a bollard.
I don’t touch anything Freedom Group/Remington Outdoor Company if I can at all help it. And this is coming from someone who really likes the ACR.
Everything under their umbrella suffers terribly. This is what happens when firearm manufacturing is mated with a stock price driven corporate entity…
Is Remington the Blackberry of the gun industry?
Do you suppose all those fired can just get together and keep right on doing what they’re doing?
Wouldn’t be the first time this happened. Even with FG. It’s exactly what Wyndham did about a year after the buyout of Bushmaster.
http://blogs.militarytimes.com/gearscout/2014/05/15/aac-is-first-casualty-as-remington-begins-consolidation-aac/
The rumor is definitely making the rounds
This is like watching the slow death of a once-brilliant galaxy as it’s swallowed by a malevolent black hole.
That’s a pretty apt description.
+1
And that black hole is “Wall Street operators.”
There is nothing that Wall Street cannot screw up these days, as the rent-seeking vampires try to suck the last blood out of the bone marrow of the American economy.
I’ve been in many “emergency meetings”, they usually don’t end well……….
I’m really glad I went with Silencerco on my last suppressor purchases.
Indeed.
I cannot think of a single “emergency meeting” in my business career that ended well. I can think of one that ended with slightly less suckage than the meeting started with, but it was like saying “Golly, I feel great! It looked at first like I was going to die, but all that happened is that I broke my back in three places!”
“Had fired” is an odd construction, since it presupposes some other time of reference (in the past) which is not named.
Or it could have just been a typo in the headline that you failed to notice was corrected before you left your comment. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best explanation.
So Faust made a bargain with the Devil and got burned? Didn’t see that coming!
I know they laid off a bunch of employees at the Hickory plant last week stating a slow down in sales.
How about the next company freedom group tries to buy tells them to pack sand?
Lessons learned. If a big conglomerate offers to buy you out, the answer is FOAD.
It should’ve been Sig all along that bought out AAC.
Wow. I guess my first can will be a Surefire SOCOM.
This is one reason that I am skeptical about consolidation of firearms manufacturing. When there are twenty companies turning out acceptable products, then the bad guys have twenty problems. When there is only one, then all of the companies vulnerabilities are concentrated into one basket.
Now, with one mega-corporation, problems can be placed in their way that can trip them up – a bank loan here that is called prematurely, a legal problem there that distracts the CEO, a union steward there who calls for a strike at the wrong moment, and bingo, the company is bankrupt. When the target is so large and juicy, anybody with a long knife can injure it.
There are people out there who hate everything Remington ever did, or ever will do. I say that concentrating a large portion of our arms manufacturing capability under one corporate umbrella invites disaster. All your ammunition in the same bunker is a bad idea, so large quantities are stored spread out in several bunkers, and across several geographically diverse facilities.
I think that the same should be done with gun manufacturing companies. That way, no single accident, no single financial miscalculation, and no single act of sabotage, can ruin more than a portion of the whole.
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