Guitar Center soon to go under???
 

It appears the writing is on the wall. Their credit rating has been falling for some time now. On Nov 29th it got downgraded again to CCC- which means it is not expected to recover. It has over 1.6 billion in debt! S&P said that Guitar Center;

“is currently negotiating with its noteholders for a potential debt exchange transaction.” (*)

“We think debt holders could receive less than par and/or the original promise on the current debt — a scenario we would view as a distressed transaction and tantamount to a selective default,” (*)

That is quite bad! I had no clue they were doing that bad. So... if you want great deals on guitars, there could be some awesome sales in 2018. However it would all be final sale. Sorry if you work there!

(*) references can be found here http://ww2.cfo.com/credit/2017/11/sp...er-rating-ccc/

There is also a short youtube video that explains things a bit. It is were I heard about this. I then checked the info for myself and found it checks out.

I guess we will just have to see. People have been calling for it for years. Doubtful they will recover, but they could technically still remain in business a few more years ....stranger things have happened

You do know that the last thread on this subject has barely fallen to the second page because the most recent posters were yesterday?

I was just in the local Guitar Center not one hour ago.
Bought 2 sets of strings.
Pretty cool place.
Lots of guitars.
We like guitars, right? :)

Like em or not - I hate to see them go away.
I know all the complaints and agree with some of them - but -
It's a place to play guitars and see how they sound/play.
Not a bad thing in my book.


Dan

Well, just to be safe (and thrifty), I'm gonna hold off on my CEO-7 purchase....;)

I wonder how many local mom and pop music stores would open back up around my area if they go out of business. I have 6 Guitar Center stores with in a 1 hour driving distance of my house. 2 with in 15 minutes.

I was just at a relatively local GC playing a CEO-7. I'm gonna hold off until the price drops some more!

A new one just opened by me in Houston about 4 months ago? There are now 9 that I know of in the Houston Metro area...granted that covers a decent amount of space but I wonder why open a new one in an area with so many stores if business overall is so bad

It'll drop over $500 if you call one of our AGF sponsors.

Nothin lasts forever, it's the way things go sometimes. Poor managing can get you there a lot quicker, however.

No, I don't know that. Before posting this I did a search on the words "guitar center" here on AGF because I hate wasting people's time with double posts. It showed the last post was made on November 28th 2017. I just did the same search now and got the exact same results. There was no reference to that thread on page 2 in the first few posts. I had assumed that it would list posts in order of most recent. Apparently that is incorrect. Or the Search tool really doesn't work very well at all!

Same here. We just had one open up less than a year ago. You'd think business was booming.

With all the new stores opening up......I wonder if they are franchised?
Maybe just thinning the heard will be the end result.



Dan