guitar center locking up !
 

just came from Guitar center hollywood, they are in the middle of
remodeling, darn, most of the guitars are locked up now
used to be fun to try out guitars but its a bit of overkill i think
Dave

I suppose the individual stores have different degrees of theft issues. My local GS doesn't lock up anything. The one downtown only locks up the most expensive guitars.

My local GC, which is literally a half mile from me and just opened a couple months ago, has EVERYTHING over about $300 locked up. It's a total buzzkill. I was so excited when it opened, but it's too much of a pain to get someone to unlock every guitar.

Went once a week after it opened and haven't been back since.

that has been happening for quite some time now. it is to keep us from complaining about the younger set playing them.

play music!

No surprise due to the location of the Hollywood GC. I am always quick on the move from the rear parking lot to the front door. In LA hardly a day passes without a news story about grab and run robberies. Young men in hoodies sweep as much as they can carry and sprint to a waiting vehicle. Not just jewelry stores, Apple and expensive makeup stores as well.

"Ain't that America for you and me..."

The benefits are worth it. The guitars stay in better condition for GC and future buyer. It’ll deter some of the tire kicking (which sometimes leads to obnoxious playing). The guitars are available for anyone interested if they ask a sales person.

Now, if only they will put some nice gear in the acoustic room again. Lately, it seems as though the GCs in my area hav moved to stocking more of the low and mid priced acoustics.

That poor store doesn't have a chance with us.
We complain when the guitars have old strings and are all scratched up.
Now we complain that the guitars are not easy to access.

What do we really want from them?

Bump it up to $500 and you have our GC. Also, our BIG one in Houston has a Platinum Room. It used to mean something. Old Brazilian RW Martins and Holy Grail D18's on top of vintage Electrics. Now maybe one or two vintage guitars and the rest are just custom shop or relic'd guitars.

Yeah,I do get what your saying
How about adults over 40 only allowed to
Play the more expensive stuff?
David

OkI used to have two local guitar centers and at one point they started locking up the good stuff. At the same time they started building a new store that was pretty much at the midpoint between both stores. When the new store opened and the other two were consolidated into this one new store, they had redesigned the acoustic room so that there were 3 levels of guitar hangers, the topmost being used for the higher end guitars. You need a staff member and a ladder to retrieve one of the upper level guitars. So the $1,500 and under guitars are still accessible to be played onehere. Of course the ones I'm thinking about buying are on the top, lol, but they gladly get them down when asked.

It's a two-sided coin. I've seen some nice guitars that were pretty banged up in GC.

Just require a credit check or show them that you can actually afford the guitar. :-)

Although, I have bought things because they were just sitting out there and could be easily tested. It’ll lose some sales. But it’ll save some guitars. Not sure which will happen more often.

This is good news actually.

I’ve avoided GC for years for two reasons:

- annoying sales kids
- annoying kids overcrowding the place, making it impossible for anybody to have a decent shot testing a guitar seriously. Way too much noise in those stores...plus guitar floor models are often in really poor condition after being abused by hundreds if not thousands of window shoppers. Making the guitar inaccessible might be a really good way to prevent this.

This is why I prefer to go to the upscale, non-chain stores. The instruments are actually properly setup and you have a real quiet room to test guitars.

If GC completely goes out of business one day I wouldn’ miss it one bit :D

I agree totally.

I can't walk into an auto showroom, grab the keys of the wall and take test drives in every car on the lot without asking, can I?

If I see a guitar that I'm interested in under lock and key, I'm not too timid to ask, and not too self-important to be offended. Anyway, if I have enough time to shop for guitars, I have enough time to wait for a salesman to fetch me the keys, so to speak.

Theft and damage results in an increased cost to us all.