| Guitar Center Fixed Pricing |
Guitar Center Goes To Fixed Pricing |
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IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT Hello Kiddies Subject Guitar Center Pricing Goes Into Effect Monday Morning April 7, 2008 9:00 AM PST Guitar Center will no longer be offering extra discounts & deals. In fact they have raised their prices !!!! The new owners have gone to fixed prices. So from now on it's going to be just like going to a Wal-Mart. There will be no one present to argue with for pricing. Gone are those old deals that you could get if you lied to them about getting a better price someplace else. They have destroyed 80% of the big independent music dealers. They put Mars away, So now it's time to reap the rewards!!!!! From now on, you won't be able to call one salesman at one store & another salesman at another store to get them to beat each other up. I have heard countless stories where different sales people at the same store actually compete with each other. Commissioned salespeople will always stab each other in the back. It will be like walking into a grocery store and arguing with the 17 year old gum chewing cashier. Update August 10 2008 The new owners of Guitar Center (Home Depot & Toys R Us) are sick and tired of their employees giving away items to their friends. So they finally did what they had to do. They leveled the prices or fixed the prices. Their new game plan is to offer 18 months interest free financing and make up for the loss by charging much higher prices. I called them today, to check some prices and the salesman I spoke to quoted me prices by giving me a monthly payment. BTW we call guitar center at least 4 or 5 times a week checking their prices. We do this so we can post our prices lower than theirs. If you find something cheaper at Guitar Center please let us know about it. I promise we will always beat their price unless the item is a limited item or a discontinued item. I asked for the price of a particular American guitar that I know comes including a hardshell case. The salesman said $38.00 a month. I said to him, Yo, Pally' !! Maybe you didn't hear me. I asked for the price, not the monthly payment. Whereupon he puts me on hold for just over 14 minutes. Then a different obviously more experienced salesman came on and gave me a price of about $165.00 higher than I sell it for here in our store. I asked him if the case was included he said no just a gig bag. I said I was paying cash & I asked if there was a cash discount? He said no, but maybe I can get the manager to drop 5% if I took a guitar with a blem on it. He said if there was no blem he could make it a blem anyway. I said to him that 95% of the guitars in the store were already blemished anyway, In fact 95% of the guitars in the whole chain are blems. He reluctantly agreed with me, then he went on to say that if he had it his way there would be no one banging the guitars around all day. I almost felt sorry for the guy. But as a businessman I can see why Guitar Center had to make this change. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to keep stores like theirs open. If they don't make a profit the new owners will not stand for it. I assume their plan is to try to bring this behemoth of a store back to some semblance of real profitability. Their overhead is incredible!!!! Those radio ads that scream about low prices are such BS!!!! The cost of those ads must be into the multi millions a year. Who do you think pays for that. That's right... The customer ultimately pays for everything. If someone steals a guitar out of there the other customers will just have to pay more!!!!!! Their last year last ditch discounting spree was probably for the benefit of trying to gain back lost customers. Also they wanted to bring the overall volume up to bring in new ownership & new money. I believe they engineered their own stock to drop so that the stockholders would sell off their shares cheaply. This would make it easier for them to engineer a leveraged buyout of all the stock. They have been on the Standard & Poors watch list for some time because the company has been steadily losing money. Buyer Beware These finance & credit card companies steal more in one week than all the criminals in the world with all their guns and weapons do in a year. Oh yeah & Paypal !!! Don't even get me started. By the way if you think you are one of the 4% of the people who will pay off the financing before the deadline. We & almost any other store in the Industry offer the same dead end financing plans that Guitar Center does. But we are MUCH cheaper. I guarantee we are much cheaper. Plus because Guitar Center has stores in almost every state you cannot avoid the sales tax that can equal yet another $100.00 before interest and about $365.00 after you pay all the interest. We only charge tax to Nevada residents and we ship worldwide. 82% of our business is in Europe & Australia. Try us out if the price seems high we will actually shop it for you & we will guarantee to beat the best price excepting in cases of limited availability.
Letters & Comments From Customers & Other Musicians. Good Evening, |
