No it doesn't. I have spent so much money on gear I could have easily bought several Gibsons.
- Says the guy who keeps his profile private so you can't see what type of gear he really buys.
What it actually turns into is : "I don't want to pay a premium for a standard product offering when I can go to their competition and get something comparable for less money".
-Says the guy who fails to use actual examples. I just bought a 2013 Gibson EB5, by all means please show me the Fender offering of that year that you feel has the same or better specs at a significantly lower price.
Why buy one nice bass when I can buy two for the same price?
-if we all used that logic none of us would own any Fenders, it would be Squier all the way man!
That's the kind of management tactic that is causing Gibson's problems. Keep in mind you need to compete with OTHER COMPANIES for talent. You don't get to be a jerk or demand people sacrifice all their family time and still keep them around anymore. It doesn't work. Someone else will offer them a better deal and they'll be gone.
-please be specific, can you name individuals at (or no longer at) Gibson that had to "sacrifice all their family time" to keep their jobs? What percent of the company employees were offered a better deal in the guitar building business and left Gibson? If you can't provide this level of detail then you are clearly parroting hearsay and Internet rumors, both of which are largely unreliable and non factual.
Their employees are self-reporting that they are unhappy, and their profits as a business are suffering. What more evidence do you need? The company isn't doing well. Employees hate it there.
- the wonderful thing about smear campaigns like this is that they eventually achieve the desired end result - the company begins to suffer and in turn tightens its belts, which in turn causes more employee dissatisfaction and so on. Start a rumor and watch it feed on itself. And I suppose the absurd heavy handed approach used by the Feds (confiscated all neck materials at gunpoint) didn't really have any impact on the business did it?
Glassdoor works just fine as a company review site. If your hypothesis that "only complainers leave reviews" is true then why would there be PLENTY of positively reviewed companies on that site?
-its anecdotal evidence at best.
I said that enough people complain about quality control that there probably is something to their complaints. You are dismissing all of their complaints based on your personal anecdotes. Have you considered that maybe you just got lucky and got a good few Gibsons? I am not saying this is the case, but consider the alternative to your belief at least once.
-and if enough people repeat a lie it rapidly get believed as the truth. Does Gibson have QC problems - yes. Name a company that has zero defects. Is there a piling on effect going on here, where Gibsons defects are getting blown out of proportion - yes.
I don't need to own a Gibson to be allowed to criticize their business practices. I'm a consumer that is in the market for their products, and has tried their products, and I know why I am not buying their products. The reasons seem to be shared from what I've read but I do take that with a grain of salt.
-please do tell, what Gibson products have or are you in the market for? Specifically which products did you try? Specifically what did you find wrong about that product that you've never heard of another bass manufacturer getting wrong?
I'm not a Gibson basher, I think their instruments are fine. I think the company is just selling them wrong.
-you're not a Gibson basher? Gee, that's exactly what I'd call someone who claims the CEO is an incompetent jerk running a company with nothing but pissed off employees who are looking for other jobs because of the toxic work environment which takes pride in putting out completely flawed defective instruments across its entire bass line and markets their mediocre non innovative boring defective products at exorbitant prices.
Their revenue numbers contradict your claim. Customers aren't coming back.
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-have you personally looked into the specifics behind this study? I haven't, but before I take things like this as gospel I like to dig a bit behind the scenes. Who funded the study? How were the questions written and what was the size of the base surveyed? How do the numbers compare to competitors, or is it an industry trend? What other work has this survey company done and how well was it received in the market? All good questions to ask before quoting some Internet source these days when junk science and data manipulation seem to abound.
I am not using any tricks. I shared with your two links earlier that show their employees are unhappy.
-I've seen the links and read the articles, which by the way are getting rather dated since everyone that has a beef with Gibson quotes them. I haven't seen any follow up independent studies that continue to support these claims or more importantly how broad within the company these issues might be. Is it just the marketing group complaining, or just the sales force, or just the manufacturing teams or maybe shipping or HR or distribution, or maybe just a few bad apples that are upset because they didn't get hired or didn't get the time off they wanted? Its a poorly written bogus smear article and nothing more.
I'm fine leaving this alone. However, I am not passing off an opinion as fact. I shared with you three facts, which are
their employees are unhappy,
-not a fact, its nothing more than a statement that has yet to be dimensionalized. Until somebody puts numbers around it you don't know for a fact if its 2 employees or 200 employees or if it 5% of the workforce (which is typically the number used by most HR organizations to define the lowest performers in the company, the group which also coincidentally has the highest dissatisfaction levels and is most prone to make disparaging comments when asked) or something much larger. So no, its not a fact, its a statement that has yet to be defined.
they slashed their instrument offerings
- And whats your point? there have been countless threads here on TB complaining that Fender has way too many offerings and they should slash their bass line up to just the bread and butter models. IIRC last time I looked Fender had something like 25 different P bass models alone. Is that the business model you think Gibson should have? What's the right number of bass models to market, and who are you to decide?
their profits are suffering
-I don't know if that true because I haven't looked and I'll be the first to admit that a given bass manufacturers profitability has absolutely zero impact on my decision to buy one of their basses off the rack or out of a showroom. The only time I would even think about the profitability of a bass company is if I was concerned about them going belly up while i had a custom order bass being built, and that hardly applies to Gibson. Now if I was a Gibson hater and just wanted to spew as much negativity about the company as possible I would use your quote about their profits suffering. Is that why you use it?
Then I clearly stated that what I think they are doing wrong is my opinion. Opinions backed by facts become arguments, but not once did I say "It's a fact Gibson's problems stem from X, Y, Z".
-but opinions backed by statements (unhappy employees) and opinions backed by irrelevant data (slashed offerings and low profits) remain just opinions and weak arguments at best. Please feel free to come back when you have strong arguments.
Anyway, I agree to disagree. It's not worth any more of my time on this.
-and on that we agree!
