Guitar Center stories good and bad

[mikeyc]

gc idiot: same thing... im not going back to look for anything else.

i was amazed.

I had the same reaction when I asked for a Behringer Ultra G DI to replace my broken one(It's a piece of crap, but I liked the cab emulator on the line out of my practice combo--for $30, it worked for me). The GC Douche hands me an Ultra DI- similar box, no cab emulator. I said no, I need the Ultra G . He walked away and said "Same thing..."

I could've garotted him with the LiveWire cables on the clearance display. If I'm going to willingly buy POS gear from them, they can at least be helpful!

[wedge]

I'm fortunate enough to have a friend who works at a local GC, and he doesn't bullshit me. What I also learned is, salespeople make commission on a sale whether it's sold full-price or employee-discount, so I've been privy to multiple employee-discounted items through my friend; some of the savings being rather large.

So, since there's no longer any competition to keep GC honest, try to make a friend of someone who works there. You'll be much better off, if you ever *do* have to go to that stinking fuck-hole of a brain-damaged tar pit...

[A-Barr]

Hahaha, don't they still have Chuck Levin's & Atomic Music down there? Ah the good ol' days... Atomic in the late nineties was the best music store ever!

[Sean Sullivan]

I never understood why everyone has such problems at Guitar Center until I moved to Nashville. Used gear is usually marked down, at most, 15%. Torn up Twin Reverb Reissues for $799, Fender Champs for $495, broken Voodoo Labs chorus pedal for $80...and everyone is short tempered and doesn't give you the time of day. I brought a Fender Champ into the store and asked how much in trade I could get for it. The guy at the register told me I probably would be better off selling it myself; they pay 40% of what the item regularly sells on eBay. I know this isn't the process at the store in Cincinnati, because I've gotten $450 for a Blues Deville and $450 for a early 90s Fender strat...they offered me $100 and I said you are going to sell this for $350 probably, why would you insult me like that? I've gone back one time, for labor day, and bought open boxed Monster Cables, returned them saying they were broke, and put them on eBay.

However, I love GC online. I usually find a really good deal every week and they don't charge much of anything for shipping. They shipped me an Orange 2x12 and a Korg DRT1000 for $8...and the thing weighed 89 pounds! I got a Voodoo Labs chorus pedal for $20, Danelectro Sitar Swami for $30, Gibson Goldtone for $199, Vox AC15 with Celestion Blue for $400...and I love the store in Cincinnati. Helpful guys who are always willing to work on price with me. Heck, I was even offered tickets to go see Def Leppard with a guy I talk to regularly.

[GooberNumber9]

I have good and bad in the same story:

Me: I need a power amp. Please sell me a Crown XTi 4000.

GC guy 1: Ok, let me get one from the back. <after 20 minutes> We don't have any.

Me: Can I buy the one on the floor? I'd really like it for this weekend [note: wanting something right away is pretty much the only thing that gets me into a GC].

GC Guy 1: You can't buy the one on the floor, but I can special order you one, we can ship it to your house if you pay for shipping.

Me: I could order one from Sweetwater shipped to my house and NOT pay for shipping. Do you have any at one of the two other stores in the area?

GC Guy 1: Let me check <here ensues really almost an hour of phone calls, sitting on hold and waiting for someone to actually answer a call from ANOTHER GUITAR CENTER. Luckily I'm chatting with an old friend of mine this whole time.>

FINALLY -

GC Guy 1: They say all they have is an open box.

Me: What's that mean? Does it have all the cables and instructions? Is it full price?

GC Guy 1: It has everything, but since it's been opened, I can give you a really good deal. [Takes exactly $80 off the price].

Me: Fine, whatever. [pay, drive to other store and pick it up]

[Before band practice I open the box and find there is NO cable and NO instructions. Just packing foam and the amp. I sigh and decide I can download a PDF and use one of my many spare power cables as long as I don't have to deal with GC any more about it. At band practice, I find that the amp emits a high pitched tone as soon as it's turned on and then starts emitting bursts of VERY loud static right at my lead singer. I'm not happy.]

Me: <walks into the other GC fuming and run right into a guy I know>

GC Guy 2, Juan: Hey Todd, how's it going?

Me: Well, I bought the last XTi 4000 you guys had here yesterday and it totally doesn't work. It was an open box.

Juan: That's funny, we have a brand new one right over there. Hold on.

Juan: Here's your brand new XTi 4000, no questions asked.

Me: Juan, you're the man.

[;ivlunsdystf]

So many of these stories are simply bewildering. They elude the normal cynical explanation of money running the show. There are other strange incomprehensible forces at play in the GC organization.

Clearly the trick to getting what you want out of GC is to find little pockets of sympathy and haste among the bewildering clouds of nonsense in the store, and then take good advantage of them. It is tricky business but the incentives in the store are obviously so perverse, in terms of commissions and stuff, that it is actually possible to get bizarrely good deals there from time to time.

Is the GC mail-order division now just sharing warehouses and stuff with Musicians Friend? You'd think they'd scale that way if they had any sense (which, if they do, is so abstractly over the heads of normal people as to approximate true divine genius/stupidity - ???)

Who said it: "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"?

[nacho459]

About 5 years ago they were doing this deal where you could get a PreSonus MP-20 and an Oktava Tube LDC for like $599. I thought Wow that's a pretty good deal. So I walk into GC in Pasadena and asked the guy for the deal, but instead of the tube mic I wanted the ML-52 ribbon mic.

First he told me that the MP-20 listed for over $599 and no such deal existed, so I pulled one of the buyers guides off the counter and showed it to him. Then he told me that he couldn't substitute the mic, even though the ML-52 was $50 cheeper then the tube mic. He then tells me he can give me the MP-20 and ML-52 for $749 and I just stare at him confused so he clicks around the computer some more and comes up with $699. At that moment I walk out.

I head across town to another GC where a friend of a friend is some dept manager or something, So I ask him about the deal, and He says he can do the deal with the ML-52, but they only have the demo MP-20 left (no manual, no IEC cable) but it is one of the original models with the Jensen transformers. He pulls the unit out of the rack and rings me up at something like $421.

The best part is I sold the MP-20 about a year ago, on ebay for over $500

[vvv]

Alright, a couple of my stories:

Happy stories; an new Epiphone Sheraton for $350 as it was "the last one, dood". Gibson GC promo SG, same story, $300.
Pristine tweed Pro, Jr., used, $150 because my girlfriend talked up the sales weasel.

Sad stories; a couple months ago a new GC opened near Midway Airport (actually, they moved a couple blocks.) I walk in in a suit and tie, a decently-stuffed wallet looking to assuage my GAS.

Weasel: "Can I help you?"
Me: "No" x 5.
Finally I tell him, "Leave me alone, I'm just looking."
He says "It's my store dood, and I can talk to you if I want."
Words are exchanged.
I ask for a manager, and leave after waiting a long 5 minutes for him to come out.

Last month I'm looking to buy a Martin, a cheap one, but a freeking Martin, and can't get a weasel to the acoustic room. I walked out.

I figure GC lost maybe 2-2/12 grand on those two days.

Hmmm, maybe they are all happy stories!

[rjd2]

i present the BEST HAPPY STORY EVER.

when i first moved to my current city, i went to the guitar center, and told the dude "call me if anything wierd or old comes through in keyboard form". he was an older guy who was really nice.

within the month, he called me when they had a 73 rhodes in perfect condition for 300. i drove up and grabbed it, and he helped me move it.

of course, GC INC. consumed his soul and he was gone within a month or two, but....for a second there was 1 good CSR.

[LeedyGuy]

I have a friend who went looking for a LDC and said that it needed have a frequency response of 20 to 20. They tried to sell him something that only went up to about 16K so he insisted on it going to 20K and the guy asked him

"Are you really gonna sing that high?"


No bullshit.


-Ken

[Andy Peters]

Hahaha, don't they still have Chuck Levin's & Atomic Music down there? Ah the good ol' days... Atomic in the late nineties was the best music store ever!

I used to tour mixing for a band who were originally from DC, so we were down there often enough and we ALWAYS stopped at both stores.

In '94 or so I bought a '64 Bandmaster head and a '66 Bassman head from Atomic. Both amps had price tags on them, $295 each. I asked the salesguy, "Hey, how about $500 for both?" "Sold!" As I'm paying, my band's singer/guitarist asked, "You bought BOTH of 'em?" "Fuck yeah. Now we gotta find space in the van ..." And on the way out, I spied a '65 blackface Deluxe Reverb that had a $395 price tag and a note saying, "Broken reverb." If we didn't have to get to sound check, I would have bought that amp, too.

I bought three dbx 160XT compressors from Chuck Levin's for I think $125 each. I sold one to the bass player for what I paid for it and I still have the other two. A couple of years later the bass player gave me a pink (!) Chuck Levin's t-shirt.

I hope those two places are still around.

-a

[Andy Peters]

I decided I needed some kinda control surface for a DAW, so I did some intergoogle research and came up with a couple of options. I drove to the newish GC here in the desert and went to the recording room, where I saw a beat-up box on the floor: a Mackie Control Universal, with a sign saying, "Open Box, $299, Ch 1 Fader Broken." Now, the thing lists for $1399 and usually goes for $999, so I'm interested.

I found one of the salesdroids and asked, "What's wrong with channel 1's fader?" "Uh, I dunno, I think it's scratchy ..." That's pretty funny, since it's a control surface and doesn't pass audio, so how could it be scratchy?

"Well, can you find someone who knows what's wrong with it?"

After about ten minutes (during which time I explained to a couple of kids in the live-sound room why they needed EQs on monitor mixes), the "department head" came over and said, "Oh, that's not $299 any more. We had a clearance sale over the weekend and now the sale is over."

"Oh, really? So, are you going to send it back to Mackie or what?"

"ummm...we don't know yet."

"Well, if someone can tell me what's wrong with the thing, I'll buy it for $299, and you won't have to inventory it and that'll be that."

Finally, another droid came over and said, "It shows an error message when it powers up ... something about 'fader calibration'." Hmmm ... I pulled the thing out of the box, plugged in the power supply, powered it up, and watched the faders dance, and sure enough, fader 1 didn't move all that fast and failed calibration. I figured worse came to worse, I can call a friend at EAW and get a new fader, so I said, "OK, I'll take it, but you need to give me a USB-MIDI interface." They threw in an M-Audio USB-MIDI dongle and I paid for it and went home.

Got home, set it up and cycled power a few times to see what the fader did. Then I opened up the unit and removed the fader. It's a tricky thing, kinda like an old radio tuner with the knob connected to a string which connected to a relative optical encoder (hence the need for calibration). I realized that the reason the fader hung up and moved slowly was because the plastic dam that keeps dust out of the fader assembly was a bit tight on the fader knob, and a quick zip with an Xacto knife solved the problem. I put it back together, and I was in business. Even if the fader was toast, and if a new one cost $100, it's still a good deal.

----------------------------------------

I recently went in there to get a Shure Beta98 D/S, as I needed one for a gig and I didn't have time to order one from Northern Sound. Of course they didn't have one in stock so I said, "I'll take the case model with a discount" so I ended up paying $199. All the while, the salesguy had to make small talk: "Oh, this is a great mic!"

"Yeah, I know, that's why I specifically asked for it and why I'm buying it!"

"It's a great drum mic!"

"Yeah, I know, but I'm going to clamp it to the hi-hat stand to mic the hats."

"Why would you do that? Why aren't you using it on a drum?"

"Because it sounds fine on the hats and it saves a mic stand on a tight stage, and besides, I prefer my EV 408Bs on toms."

"I've never heard anyone do that, and what are those mics?"

"Never mind ... i have to leave."

-a

[???????]

Went in to GC tonight.

Said "Do you have a stereo bar, for stereo micing?"

GC Pro Audio Rep: Blank stare

me: "You know, like a little metal bar that you can attach a couple of mics to, and it attaches to a single mic stand?"

GC rep: Blank stare.

GC manager over in the corner: Tosses GC rep a cheap $10 stereo bar.

Me: "Perfect, cool. Do you happen to have one of those barrel adapters that reverses the polarity on an XLR cable?"

GC rep: "Yeah, of course... we have a ton of those, let me grab one for you."

Me: Follows him over to the rack of adapters, etc.

GC rep: "So what do you want the polarity changed to, quarter-inch?"

Me: "No, see, I want an XLR to XLR adapter, but where pins 2 and 3 are reversed, to change the polarity of the balanced signal."

GC Rep: "Okay, right sure... here you go" (hands me an XLR male-male gender exchanger).

Me: "No, I don't need that... you know how on a console there's a little button to reverse "polarity" or "phase?"

GC rep: Nods uncertainly

Me: "Well, I want a little thing that goes on the end of the XLR cable that does that."

GC manager over in the corner: "I don't think we have anything like that."

Me: "Just the stereo bar then, please."

[RefD]

*thinks about last time into local GC*

*gets bowel cramps*

[wedge]

I hope those two places are still around.

Yep. Still here. The only music stores of consequence in the DC area that've survived the GC invasion. Personally, I love Atomic, because it's totally different and unique, while Chuck's seems to have survived by looking, feeling and acting like just another Guitar Center, so I'm not too keen to go there anymore...