The Steel Guitar Forum

My dad, a school band director, started a small music store in our house back in 1957 so his students would have a place to buy reeds, valve oil, etc. He branched out into guitars, accordions, printed music, etc. At the time, he could call Fender or Gibson and order one or two guitars and they would ship them to him.
I left a job as a television producer at Oklahoma State University to work with him in 1985. The store had hundreds of band and orchestra instruments rented at the time and sales were good.
Fast forward a few years to catalogs and then the internet, and sales took a big hit. There came a time when Fender and Gibson said they didn't want to hear from you unless you had a $10,000 opening order and expected to sell that much yearly.
We are still open and doing business. If someone comes in, I can restring, tune and or repair you guitar, Uke, Mandolin, Banjo, tenor banjo or dulcimer. I can also play a scale on your trumpet, clarinet, flute, saxophone, baritone horn or trombone to see if it is working properly, and do repairs on some of these instruments. Anything needing extensive repair or overhaul I send out to a full time pro. I can repair or tune your violin, viola, cello or bass viol. I also give lessons on several instruments and piano.
I am 71. My son bought the business from me. What really has kept it going is the school student rentals. This year, with the virus, that business was poor. We live in a small town of about 5,000 population. We are the last Mom/pop music store in our county. I don't know how many more years we will exist.

rick andrews wrote:Guitar Center is on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. Again. They missed a payment on $45 million this month. And according to the NY Times they are $1.3 billion in debt. That's a lot of telecasters.

They furloughed thousands of employees earlier this year. Apparently another business victim of coronavirus.

The coronavirus has merely supercharged the inevitable for Guitar Center. GC and many other box stores are deeply in debt and failing due to: A- irresponsible growth to please their corporate owners & stock holders (and to avoid debt that will over-run them when they quit expanding) and B: the convenient brown truck at-home deliveries from Amazon and e-commerce in general.

You ever drive through big urban areas wondering how those cookie-cutter malls with all the same box stores (JC Penny’s, Home Depot, Staples, PetSmart, Macy’s etc etc) can survive so close to each other? Well they can’t. Box Stores and how they do their corporate accounting, are like sharks. If they quit expanding (swimming forward), they die. Their payables catch up with them and they no longer can “rob Peter to pay Paul”.

There will be a lot of malls and failing box stores across America trying reinvent themselves soon. Maybe it’s a bit of karma for what they did to mom & pop retail.

My 2 cents......

I have been in countless stores, music-related and otherwise, where I have been treated as a stupid old person. That often changes when I start to politely ask pointed questions about an instrument or piece of merchandise. It’s like a switch goes on in their eyes where they realize I’m not just a dumb person or someone looking for a $150 guitar. That change in attitude is most pronounced in young sales people. Eventually, they ask, “Umm, how long have you been playing?”

True story. I once went into a GC and they had an Emmons LG II on the floor. I paid $1200 for it.