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Well I thought that I had seen everything in business prior but this one is blowing my mind - Best Buy is now selling Martin, Gibson, Taylor, Fender and many more brands of guitars and instruments....

I heard this from David Collins yesterday while I was in Ann Arbor so on the way home I checked it out for myself. Best Buy has walled off a section of their stores and is now a music store too. They have invested heavily in this new pursuit for them and the BB that I visited looks like a small Guitar Center with a great variety and decent stock levels.

I spoke with the store manager and he told me that over 150 Best Buys are offering guitars now with more planned to make the transition in the near future.

A couple of things that are on my mind are as follows:

1) Not the best economy to expand a business into a completely new pursuit...
2) The established and long term Martin, Gibson, Fender, and Taylor dealers have to be livid not unlike when Wal-Mart comes to town...
3) They are offering service too, or at least some level of limited service which is not what I would have expected from a big box store.
4) David suggested that this was a spin-off from the success that Best Buy has experienced from "Guitar Hero" and I agree - it seems like the GH game has given a bump to interest in playing the real deal.

So not that there is any stopping it and not that I would even want to do so because I always have believed that even cheap imported guitars contribute in time to the growth of the high-end guitar market but Best Buy?

So what do you think - is this a good thing? Who will benefit besides Best Buy? Would you buy a guitar from Best Buy?

Hesh,

Don't be surpised when Best Buy adds a frozen vegetable aisle.

Mike

I noticed that too a couple of months ago - I was perusing one of the Sunday best buy inserts in the reading room when I noticed it. It must certainly be driven from the success of Guitar Hero/Rock band.

I have mixed feelings just as most must. The first thing that came to mind is that the old school dealers would be pissed as I would be too. On the other hand, there's no way best buy will be able to provide the level of knowledge that the local places can provide. Yet on the other hand still, if BB provides health insurance and the local guys don't, they might be able to draw some talent from the small guys.

Over all, I think it will be good for "music" in general as I think even more kids might get the idea to get into it, but bad for the small music store.

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Hesh,I think if it creates more jobs, it's a good thing.It also probably makes guitars more acessable for more people.I know people that have to drive a long way to get to a guitar store and it would be nice to have a music store more handy for them.I think it's a good thing to get more exposure to the music world as well. Mark

I think it is a great way to target new or beginner guitarists. Do you remember how intimidating it was to go to the local "real" music store back in the sixties and seventies and pick up a guitar and fumble with the "D" chord?
While I still prefer the Mom and Pop music stores it is becoming harder and harder for them to survive without an internet presence and good student base. Time will tell.........

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jw ( o)===:::

Im curious if Best Buy has hung a sign on the wall that says "No stairway to heaven!"?

I'm sure it has most certainly been fueled by the success of GH and RB, but it may also be in preparation for some of the newer games currently in development that are similar to these, but employ the use of real guitars as opposed to controllers. It'll be interesting to see how well they do. I'll have to go to my local BB and check it out. If nothing else, it'd certainly be a convenient location for me to run out and grab a set of strings or something.

If the level of guitar expertise at Best Buy is equal to the level of computer expertise then ... well, enough said. Not that it's as bad as some places but it isn't all that good either.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

I played a great $500 strat there about a month ago. They're not a high end dealer, but they have a good variety, and it was easy to browse in. The only staff member was at the counter and didn't swing by every two minutes.

I'm not a fan of corporate sprawl. They seem to eat into any and every space that a small and personal business has success. I miss the days when someone showed up at your door to sell lessons on a guitar or accordian and he's who you bought the instrument from (it's how I first learned to play guitar). They are all about profit and market shares and will abandon real guitars when the market shifts to air-digital guitars (or something like that) anyway. I only hope that the small builders, stores etc. will survive in the meantime

I hate to hear this. Not that I am in the business of selling guitars, but because I am of the mentality that a local economy is better for the locals, in the long run of things.

If BB is carrying Martin and Taylor, these builders now have one more HUGE client they have to please. And, this client (BB) is in the "cut prices/deliver crap posing as quality products" kind of industry. I would not be surprised to see Martin and Taylor yield a bit under pressure and start producing more low end, cheap guitars. And how will they do this????? That's right, more over-seas production. How long do you think Taylor can compete with Made in USA only instruments? Their only hope is that the economy continues to crash and the dollar plummets so it gets cheaper to build here than in China or Taiwan or Mexico.

How many kids do you know who play gameboy/playstation/etc all the time have the patience or attention span to persevere in something as difficult as playing a guitar well?

Just my 2 cents, but I don't see BB as a positive contributor to our culture. I lump them in with Walmart.

Quite a few, but I'm in education and see my fair share. They're also surprisingly dedicated to those games and are able to work at them harder and longer than I would've imagined.

This has been going on for a while now, I think.

I'd heard from someone who works at Guitar Center HQ that Best Buy was competing for the low end market. They were marketing aggressively to protect their market.

I'm surprised to see that Taylor is offering a full line of guitars, up into the $4,000 range. Martin, on the other hand, has limited their selection to laminate/entry level offerings. Hmmm. Does that say something about the two companies?

Personally, I think a lot of folks would welcome a music store with a checkout aisle. It takes about 40 minutes to buy a guitar at Guitar Center after you've said "I'll take it".

As for the Mom and Pops, I love em' too, but if we've loved them enough to do all of our shopping there, they'd be thriving.

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John Watkins
CNC Guitar Parts

You'd be REALLY surprised at the capacity that kids actually have to focus and learn once they put their minds to it. It's easy to bash video games as lesser pursuits, but take a shot at playing some of these games for yourself and you'll see how difficult it really is to master them on the level that many have. If you don't believe me, go look at a first-person view of a person playing Starcraft on YouTube and see if you could even hope to follow that. Kids aren't unable to learn guitar, they just have had little desire or real incentive to do so. It's a popular instrument, but playing instruments are nowhere near as popular or mainstream in our culture as video games. That's all.

What's old is new again. Sears, Monkey Wards, etc used to all offer various low to mid level instruments. Along with records, stereos and stuff.

So far as I can tell, the two biggest guitar companies still making everything in Canada or the US are Godin...followed by Collings. Everyone in between has already gone overseas or down South for a significant amount of their production. I'm reserving judgment on whether the 'big boxing' of 'good' guitars is a good or bad thing, but the outsourcing of labour and the moving away of production happened long before Best Buy was in the picture for any of these companies.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

"We need a clean-up in Aisle 4 by the Taylor blisterpaks...a clean-up in Aisle 4 by the Taylor blisterpaks"

Hesh, I don't think your second point is or will be true. Best Buy has no qualms about charging top dollar, full-pop, manufacturers suggested retail on the goods they sell. In fact, I have given up on buying anything there because they are so much more expensive than shopping on-line (and paying shipping.)

I was just told the other day that the local (Duluth, MN) Best Buy is one of the stores that sells guitars, and my first thought was that they would carry the kind of crap found in K-Mart and Target (for my non-US friends, those are inexpensive department stores.) But I was told they carry good factory guitars. If you're willing to sell Heshtone guitars at 40% off, to retailers, maybe we'll be seeing your guitars in there too!

Dennis

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Dennis Leahy
Duluth, MN, USA
7th Sense Multimedia

I feel that this is part of a larger problem as:
Unfortunately it creates more low paying jobs, and eliminates livelyhoods for seasoned professionals, mainly in the "repair and teaching" ends.. but also retailers .. who barely make a decent living as it is sometimes..
Its the same thing as WM coming into a town offering every good and service at high volume prices using semi skilled labour at minimum wages
and driving all the Mom & Pop shops off the block...
Such is the way of a free enterprise, market driven system, based on a model of unlimited growth,,,
unsustainable....
Im all for free enterprise... but the manifest destinty, greed feed - monopoly madness system is way outdated... even if many dont see it yet ..
In a world of dwindling resources.. and very little (if anything) in place to replace them... a new model needs to be introduced - luckily the upcoming generations are begining to see this.. (I hope)
People should start rewarding businesses that contribute as much as they take .... if not a little more...
Employing a generational system, where this generation takes responsibility for upcoming generations,,, is the wave of the future IMHO
It has to be!
Once it looked like the forests, fish and oil etc would never end.... its almost unthinkable that weve depleted them to the degree we have!
But alot of it has been through waste....
I sincerely hope, and sincerely pray that we have entered an era of personal responsibility, corporate responsibility, personaly accountability, corporate accountabilty... and communal ingenuity will create the solutions we need!
Im not particularily bagging on huge BigBox stores - we've ALL contributed to this through an attitude of
"give me convenience or give me death"
Im sorry to launch into a mini tirade but its becoming very aggravating to see small business diminish because of a poorly thought out economic model.
Cheers
Charlie

See the pattern here? If the brave new world of the "global economy" continues down this road, it won't stop until everyone on the planet is making the same wage.

Our local BB had its musical instrument department installed just before the economy went in the tank.

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The member formerly known as erikbojerik....

Thanks for sharing your thoughts everyone and many of you made some really, really good points that I had not pondered prior.

When I was a kid in the 60's there was one local music store in my home town, a mom-and-pop in the truest sense where Mr Aldridge ran the store, did the repairs, sold the merchandise and his wife Mrs. Aldridge worked the register and did the books. They were wonderful people and I would ride my Schwinn Ran's Horn Fastback down there nearly every day after school and just hang out.

Folks seldom came in so I kind of had the place to myself and in short order Mr. Aldridge and I became friends. He would show me how to play songs, scales, and let me have the run of the place. I have very fond memories of being thrilled while sitting on the floor and pulling out the cases and opening them only to discover Les Paul Gold Tops and what are now vintage Strats.

Sometimes Mr. Aldridge would yell from the shop area "hey Hesh come on back here I want to show you something." I remember how he showed me how he used a D cell battery to test speakers and watching the cones move in and out as he held the leads to the terminals.

I was in heaven and surrounded by beautiful guitars, huge amps, and most importantly two very fine human beings that felt more like family to me than store owners.

Several years later when I went into the the store after school as I did nearly every day it was all dark and there was a stranger in there. I asked where Mr. Aldridge was and the stranger told me that he had died last night of a heart attack.... I was devastated and ran out of the place and jumped on my bike with tears in my eyes. I rode and rode for what seemed like hours not understanding how such a terrible thing could happen. This ride these days when I think about it reminds me of the short story "The Rocking Horse Winner."

Anyway sorry to be long winded, I never liked it the first time that I ever visited a Guitar Center either. To me it feels like a death of something old, trusted and true that was a wonderful time for me and an even more wonderful memory now that I am an old fart....

Hesh, I can relate to most of that even though we're from different generations. I spent so many afternoons in there local stores here that have gone out of business since Guitar Center came. I played my first "all solid wood" acoustic as they called it, couldn't afford it, and came home to find the MIMF on afternoon in July when I was 15. I got my first professional quality guitar at another, a Custom Shop Fender. The main reason those stores went out of business, sadly enough, was that Guitar Center had better instruments. GC certainly isn't a high end retailer, but the small shops here were only carrying middle of the road lines.

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The interesting part, for me, is that Godin is still doing it all in Quebec. They're over twice as big as Taylor and Martin...combined...and they're doing it without resorting to cutting wages and foreign manufacturing. I don't think it's doom and gloom for the domestic manufacturing industries, but I do think we're going to have to cut some flab and get lean to compete. <--- for anyone who understands the subtext in there (hint: think Toyota)

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services