Pat my friend this inclination to notice that many of the guitars in the stores .... well ... suck happens to all of us I think. When I was working in the city and farther away from my shop than I like to be I used to spend my "diet" lunches in the local Guitar Center sitting in the high-end... acoustic guitar room next to the moldy humidifier that no one had refilled with water in ages. I would take the guitars off the walls and sit and play them.
My goal when I started building was to build great sounding and playing guitars and I used these visits to GC and sometimes Elderly to compare what I was learning to what was available off-the-shelf so-to-speak from the usual suspects. In time the fact*ry guitars, with some exceptions, just didn't cut it anymore.
Last September when Uncle Bob and Bob Connor were in town for the Ann Arbor gathering one of our stops was this very same GC store. I found it interesting to watch these guys too while playing 3-4K fact*ry guitars with a look on their faces as if constipation had set in....
It's funny how something that once was the goal is now something that just no longer excites.
OTOH I love crappy, cheap guitars because they are actually way better today than what was available when we started playing. Folks can learn to play for very little money and the set-ups on a $200 guitar today are much better than they were on the equivalent cheap guitar 40 years ago. Once they learn to play and if they desire something different, I won't go as far as to use subjective terms such as "better", they may become a very valued client to one of the 4,000+ members here...
It's all good!
