Been a happy Sweetwater customer ever since. I've had 3 different reps and I know them all quite well at this point.
I am glad some local stores have survived, either battling GC valiantly or being far enough away from them. Having a hub for lessons, repairs, expertise, etc. is very nice to have around still.
However, Guitar Center would be just fine if it didn't have all the debt Bain Capital loaded it with.
Guitar Center needs Chapter 7 bankruptcy, not Chapter 11. Discharge the debt, dump underperforming stores, let the major players bid on the remains, and restart.
Chapter 11 is just playing a shell game with the Bain debt instead of nuking it.
It's amazing how little things like that make the sale.
Now, as someone who lives online and has a solid misanthropic streak, I find this human interaction slightly annoying. However, for a lot of musicians this really seals the deal.
That said, I'd love to go to a GC in person and try before I buy. Just...not during a pandemic.
If GC ends up closing, hope more local shops can benefit.
But I feel for my buddies that make electronic music. They loved GC since they could try out the synthizers and drum machines before they bought.
It doesn't help that with Gibson's quality control, you're maybe getting a $300 instrument for your $1500.
I know a lot of guitarists. Professionals. They all are buying new guitars frequently. There's too many niches to fill and variation between instruments. I know quite a few who cycle through a couple of dozen guitars bought and sold every year just to find instruments with the right sound.
anecdotal case in point: did once try out a new guitar, sounded good there - get it back to my house and line feedback like no other. i have many other guitars that work fine on this setup, but this one wanted to be a complainer...no way that any hands-on demo would have stopped that, unless i haul all my gear in there as well.
I agree that if sales go to Amazon instead, that's a loss for customers and the community. On the other hand, online retailers can't really compete when it comes to being able to actually try out the exact instrument you're buying. Guitars aren't completely homogeneous; one might sound better than another, or have different wood grain, or whatever.
Also, physical stores can provide guitar setup and repair services. Local setup can help a lot: manufacturers will often set the action very conservatively at the factory because they don't know what kind of humidity conditions the guitar will endure in transit or at its final destination, and they don't want the frets to buzz when someone takes it out of the box. Consequently, the strings are higher than they need to be which makes it unnecessarily hard to play. Fixing that is pretty simple and makes a big difference.
I hope that if Guitar Center closes a lot of their business goes to smaller local music shops for those reasons. However, I expect that if GC is having a hard time, a lot of other music stores are in just as bad of a situation and a lot of them are going to close.
> That said retail, particularly non essential retail ( my various instruments are all effectively toys, I'd guess the working musician to hobbyist ratio to easily be 1:100) is getting hit hard. No one NEEDS a news 1500$ Gibson.
Back around 2007-ish, there was a surge in sales of ukuleles, as a large number of recently-unemployed people with a lot of time on their hands were looking for a cheap hobby. My own anecdote from this last summer was that I made a pond and in early fall went looking for koi to put in it, but a local supplier was sold out and couldn't get more. Apparently there was more demand than has been seen in a long time, which makes sense. If you're stuck at home and need a project, why not make a koi pond?
If you’re in a city though, I can’t recommend local music shops enough. So much about what makes a guitar (or any instrument) great is how it plays for you. How it feels.
I’ve bought dozens of guitars online. I’ve returned maybe 95%. I’ve returned 0% of the guitars I’ve bought locally. It’s all about how they play.
The abundance of cheap gear / equipment to fill the shelves makes it feel more like a big lots of music with premium prices.
Once it looked like GC was in trouble in 2007-2009ish, those large brands worked on other sales channels and stopped extending GC so much credit once they were established.
Guitar Center had to sell Harmony Central off to Gibson to cover its debts years ago and basically has nothing else going for it. None of their instrument brands are any good.
I do. Donations accepted. ;-)
(Sadly a Gibson [not Epiphone] Les Paul Standard is more like $2500, though a Special or sub-$1K Tribute looks like it might be a pretty good deal for a US-made Gibson...)
That’s my line in the sand
if online has enough real value it will stay
if just enough, long term sufferings will happen then it will be removed
otherwise people will reopen things they need (just like vynil and newspapers)
No it won't. That will free up space so that your social interaction isn't the hardware store, but instead some place meant for entertainment. Hell, we might even build some public spaces. If you enjoy mumbling some words to a cashier you life might be a drag, but the arcade pub that replaces that market is gonna be rad.
Well my sister used to work as a cashier at a local hardware store when she was a teenager before they got obliterated by Lowes and Home Depot and pretty much everybody would go there to buy their sundry needs for various projects. Turns out that you strike up a conversation with someone who lives in your neighborhood, you find out about their projects, then their family, then their lives. It's you know, community, not mumbling words at some faceless person that is a poor cog for megacorp whose only plan is to literally extract more money from the community than they inject.
Local hardware stores are actually doing well. They are a little more expensive, but have made up for it by having someone who knows where to find what you need quickly.
The independent music shops are so much more welcoming and helpful.
Small shops always gave better service to the little guy because that was their business.
Normally I am totally ad-blocked, but my Mac refuses to reconnect to my OSS Airplay Raspi contraption, and I just don't feel like rebooting ( already killed coreaudiod ).
I wired up my tuner with a dipole and am listening to radio through the ether mind you. No adblocking though.
Amazon is almost absent in NL at the moment, but they will crush the competition in a couple of years.
Amazon should be broken up.
For offering more products and better service at a lower price? They don't have a monopoly on anything.
The governments role should not be to subsidize uncompetitive businesses. That hurts consumers.
The US defense sector requires domestic manufacturing for good reason. The US recently got bitten hard with an inability to manufacture 5G equipment.
The loss of skills accompanying loss of industry is a huge problem that can take decades to fix.
There is a reason pilots prefer flying two engine aircraft, even though you really only need one engine. Redundancy is important.
In the absence of outside influence, scale produces monopolies that haven't the slightest interest in serving consumers, much less competing to win their favor. Have you ever BOUGHT anything from Amazon and gotten screwed by them? Have you been given random stuff by third parties working (successfully!) to game the Amazon system so their garbage is full of fake testimonials and is #1 recommended Amazon product in their category?
Competitive businesses gotta start from somewhere or there will NEVER be any others. It will just be 'what was competitive, once, and forever' because infrastructure and scale lock in and then you're monopolized and it no longer matters.
Show me the alternative to Amazon. Show me the alternative to YouTube. There is by definition no competitive option to any of these things because they locked in controlling positions, and now it doesn't matter what they do: they are NOT subject to any sort of competitive forces because it's too late. It doesn't matter what they do to consumers: there's nowhere else to go.
In the US retail market? Walmart (2x the size of Amazon), eBay, Kroger, Home Depot, Lowes, HEB, Costco, Target, Walgreens, Staples, CVS, Publix, Albertsons, Aldi, Macy's, Best Buy, OfficeMax, Nordstrom, Kohl's... I can continue if you want. Those are just off the top of my head.
>Show me the alternative to YouTube.
Netflix, cable, Hulu, Amazon, HBO, Disney, Sling, there's a few more. It's a very competitive market and it's why YouTube hardly makes any money, if they actually make any at all.
I think you are making the common error of conflating "big company" with "monopoly". Amazon doesn't control supply in a market like say the USPS with first class mail or your utility with electrical supply.
Tons of competition to Amazon. Tons. For anything you want to buy, there are other places that sell it.
there aren't any other companies that offer the full range of what you can get from amazon (cloud services, audio/video streaming, physical goods, etc.), but there is viable competition in each of those markets.
for cloud: google and microsoft
for streaming: spotify, google, apple, netflix, hulu
for physical goods, walmart also has a huge inventory of many different SKUs and they offer free two-day shipping on a lot of them (without needing a subscription). there are also tons of specialty retailers like newegg and microcenter.
LOL, Amazon makes up maybe 30% of my online shopping. Less if I can get away with it. The rest is _all_ other places to go.
This is similar to anti dumping taxes we have against chinese products.
Having everything flow into a Amazon Monopoly of retail isn't great. Even just going in the stores to talk and get a literal feel for instruments is great.
The biggest issue with online retail is it erodes one of the last community functions. Particularly for older Americans retail shopping might be their only social interaction all day.
If 2050 is this dystopia where everything is ordered online, all food is dropped off by drones, it's going to be very bleak.
That said retail, particularly non essential retail ( my various instruments are all effectively toys, I'd guess the working musician to hobbyist ratio to easily be 1:100) is getting hit hard. No one NEEDS a news 1500$ Gibson.
Edit : Worth while to add a with concerts being shut down the professional market is effectively dead as well. I wouldn't count on this returning until late 2021 at best