GUITAR CENTER Scheme's

[cbassman55]

Dead horse thread, but I've managed two music stores and if any of my employees had offered someone 60% of the NEW price for a piece of used gear I would have fired them on the spot.

If they had offered me $250-300 for that cab I would have taken it on the spot. There is just no market for them now and probably never will be. (I had one, all four of my current cabs combined weigh only thirty pounds more than your 2x15 does).

Absolutely!

 

[AboutSweetSue]

Possible epic troll here? There is no way this is real.

 

[pcake]

guitar center has always given me the price for the thing i'm trading in plus 15% toward the new item i'm trading for. so at any of the four guitar centers i've done this with, you'd have gotten $250 plus $120 toward the new item if it was $800, $15 toward the new item if it was $100.

 

[4001]

What's wrong with it?

 

[Cave Puppy]

This entire thread made my head hurt.

 

[4001]

A poor setup or dead strings equals bad bass.

More like neglect equals bad store management and further dings their overall image.

 

[4001]

I've bought several great basses for peanuts that started out like this.

That bass is 900 peanuts...... there's enough room between the strings and the fretboard for an entire bushel of them.

 

[Brad Johnson]

No! I'll keep it and they should have come up $50 to make a $999.99 sale. There lost with waisted employer time. Profit margin went out the door. LOL

Hardly. That is an interesting POV.

 

[Brad Johnson]

More like neglect equals bad store management and further dings their overall image.

Some people will never get it. That is a given.

 

[dave64o]

I actually did look online "eBay/reverb" the market price is around $400. But like I stated, I called previously and spoke with a GC rep. He said they would pay 60% of the price of new towards new gear. Misinformation from the start.
Not my fault. I wish he would have been upfront and say I would be better to sell it by other means because they don't sell and say the most they could pay for a good condition working cab is!!! If someone accepts the estimate and brings it in, it should be in good condition, working with no issues. If they don't match pictures sent then they should be offered a low ball offer or no sale.

Are you sure it was misinformation? Is there any chance you were so stoked by the idea of getting top dollar for your bad ass gear that you misinterpreted what was said?

If you did the research then that should have made you question the quasi-quote you say you got over the phone because it was so far out of line with the market. Whether it was intentional misinformation (honestly, I doubt that), wishful thinking on your part leading you to inadvertently misinterpret what was said, or anything else, I can't imagine making a decision to jump in my car and drive 3 1/2 hours without double checking my information to make sure I make a data-driven decision to act and not an emotion-based decision.

Those emotion-based decisions will get you every time.

 

[Brad Johnson]

Customer comes first went out the door! Yes I learned not to waists my time reading your post! Drop the mic!!

The saying is not "the misguided customer is always right". And with today's margins, there isn't that much room to play with.

There was a time when people would go to buy a new car, trade in their worthless car for thousands and think they got a great deal. Because they had no idea that there was such a thing as dealer markup, additional dealer markup including ridiculously priced dealer options and things like taking their negative equity and tacking it onto the new loan. And people were happy.

 

[Brad Johnson]

I found a $5k NAMM Show bass with a similar setup for $1200. I bought it, set it up, restrung it, gigged with it for a couple of years then reluctantly sold it for more than double what I paid for it. So...

 

[4001]

I found a $5k NAMM Show bass with a similar setup for $1200. I bought it, set it up, restrung it, gigged with it for a couple of years then reluctantly sold it for more than double what I paid for it. So...

So... good for you. If you wanted the bass in the pics that I posted, you'd still be paying full price and then you can fix the neck too.
When the average (serious) GC customer walks in and wants to try that bass out because that person likes the way it looks, then cannot play it because with action like that it's mostly unplayable, that is a GC fail big time.
GC isn't going to drop everything and set it up so that person can try it out and the fact that it looks like it does tells me that they never touched the bass since it arrived and since I've seen many others there like that it also tells me that they dont give a rats rear end about the upkeep of their inventory.
I wouldn't want that bass after 150 turns on the truss rod to straighten out the neck. I'd rather get one that was taken care of from day one.
Just the way I roll.

 

[4001]

Some people will never get it. That is a given.

Sure.
I worked for a decent music store for a couple years and they would NEVER have a bass on the floor that was "set up" like that one was.
I guess you don't get it either.
Work for GC ?

 

[dbsfgyd1]

LOL I'm sure it is very tempting to go browse every so often, living and working so close.
Yea, I'm sure I burned a bridge ranting on TB about GC but I hope they see my point of view.

This board was built on sharing opinions. No worries my friend.

 

[Admiral Akbar]

This might be true for some things, but it's more accurate to say that things depreciate based on their resale appeal, period. Nobody wants that old 8-bit sampler or that MIDI sequencer that was built in 1993 to hook up to some specific keyboard that nobody owns anymore. You can't sell that kind of stuff. Advancing technology makes everything obsolete, eventually. Belief in these sorts of formulas is what disappoints a lot of would-be sellers when they find out that their ancient gear doesn't have much value in the real world.

When I was working in music sales, the internet was just becoming a factor. Ebay was a new thing. People would come in all the time looking for unrealistic offers on their used gear and Ebay was the great leveler. "You don't like this offer, you're welcome to try to sell it yourself online for that price." Sometimes they did, often they couldn't and they'd come back two weeks later to accept the offer originally made. The only truth about resale value is that the market dictates what everything is worth.

GC will take your item, determine what price they can sell it at (they look at Reverb and eBay sold items prices), and then will give you around 60% of what they intend to price the item.

It’s as simple as that.

So, if GC believes your item is worth $200 used, expect to get paid around $120. GC as the buyer will determine what it believes the value of your item is. And to do that, they do due diligence by consulting past sales on Reverb/fleabay.

 

[Brad Johnson]

So... good for you. If you wanted the bass in the pics that I posted, you'd still be paying full price and then you can fix the neck too.
When the average (serious) GC customer walks in and wants to try that bass out because that person likes the way it looks, then cannot play it because with action like that it's mostly unplayable, that is a GC fail big time.
GC isn't going to drop everything and set it up so that person can try it out and the fact that it looks like it does tells me that they never touched the bass since it arrived and since I've seen many others there like that it also tells me that they dont give a rats rear end about the upkeep of their inventory.
I wouldn't want that bass after 150 turns on the truss rod to straighten out the neck. I'd rather get one that was taken care of from day one.
Just the way I roll.

The average serious GC customer?
Between that and your exaggeration I guess you consider yourself one.

 

[Brad Johnson]

Sure.
I worked for a decent music store for a couple years and they would NEVER have a bass on the floor that was "set up" like that one was.
I guess you don't get it either.
Work for GC ?

That bass wasn't set up. I get that. And as someone who doesn't consider GC to be the evil empire, yeah, it must be because I work there.

Your assumption that they wouldn't have someone look at the action in the store flies in the face of my experience getting them to do just that, on more than one occasion. The difference being I didn't assume they wouldn't (like you), I asked.

In the meantime overly dramatic and underly informed folks are constantly assaulted by them. The horror.

 

[/\/\3phist0]

There is one of those cabs on Reverb in acceptable condition that is down to $250 and still sitting there. I could likely offer the guy $200 and pick it up this afternoon...

If there was any scheme, it was that they were trying to make it seem like it wasn't working right so they could just say "Sorry, we can't buy gear not working correctly" Did it all the time with stuff we knew was going to sit around forever killing the used gear numbers.

The reason that no one will give you any numbers over the phone, even with 8x10 color glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one is because there is a company policy against it. There's a couple of reasons... Firstly, pictures can be manipulated and fudged and can't be verified and don't tell anything about the working condition of the gear. When you're given a range of value it can be considered an offer to buy, which only a manager can make to start, and could trigger lawsuits in some instances. Not worth doing in light of that, and when I was at GC 20+ years ago I had to fire someone for doing it.

The main reason (and it IS a bit manipulative) for not giving estimates over the phone (or email or text) is that you are more likely to accept an offer after you've lugged your gear all the way to the store. It used to be policy that you tested the gear with the customer and then put it where they could see it, but was behind a counter or just inside an office on the sales floor because the buyer has a psychological advantage in that it seems as though they've already got the gear.

In this case, though, they made a more than reasonable offer to someone who didn't take any time to do homework on the deal.

Just a touch of advice... It is not the store's responsibility to educate their customers. Be a well educated customer or be a target. Sales people are not there to help no matter what they say. They are there to make money.


FWIW, I sell stuff I'm no longer using to GC 95% of the time because, unless it's something very desirable, it's not worth the hassle of dealing with buyers. Every time I sell to GC I get what I ask for, and sometimes my price is too low and I get more. Here's the equation - you get 60% of the average price the item sells for. If it's something that is still available new, they will list the used item for 60% of the new price as long as it's in good or better condition.

There I was sitting on the group W bench.

 

[pcake]

There I was sitting on the group W bench.

on a note only related to this post, when i was 15, i could play on acoustic guiar, sing and narrate all of alice's restaurant...

okay, back to the regularly scheduled thread.