Price increases?

[Dbone]

What has your guys’ experience/observations been with the price of guitars generally? Much to my surprise here in Canada there have been significant price increases on the higher tier 26/36/56 level Yamahas. Appears to be only in Canada and not the US.

200 dollar increase on the 26, 400-500 increase on 36, and approximately a 600 dollar increase on the 56 level.

That is a big increase. A bit insane if you ask me.

I haven’t been paying much attention with what’s going on with prices more generally. You guys noticing any such increases on your particular brands of choice?

[Martin_F]

The Yamaha FG Red Labels also went up between $150 and $200 in Canada, along with the LL’s and that series. My guess is that there was a price raise across the board to account for our low dollar lately.

Price changes are tough because you start to creep up and you get into more competition with other guitars. However, Martin raises their prices just about every year too. The MAP in Canada is usually fairly equal to the US, but the difference is that dealers in the US will bargain on those prices some. In Canada you are lucky if anyone will do below MAP.

Martin

[Wade Hampton]

Honestly I have no idea, because I already own more guitars than I need and have only been in one music store since the pandemic lockdown orders in Anchorage were partially lifted a month and a half ago. When I was in there I only played the Martins, because playing Martins always cheers me up.

Sorry that I can’t give you any insights, but it’s nice to have a touch of musical normality in these dark and dysfunctional days, however fleeting those musical glimpses might be.

Keep your spirits up. Don’t let rising guitar prices bring you down. Everything made in China is going to getting costlier because of low energy but rising trade war tensions that both governments are using to keep their restive populations focused on an exterior foe because that’s much easier to do than solve the internal problems nagging at both nations.

Neither of the governments are completely at fault, neither of them are right about everything.

Plus there are the billions of ordinary people like all of us, most of us with no obvious political axes to grind, just trying to get through this stultifying pandemic strangeness that all of us are suffering from, regardless of political affiliation or nation of origin.

We all just want to get through this. That’s all. We’re social animals and this is suffocating all of us, and we want and need to get past this.

So hang in there and maybe we should count our blessings for now, those of us who still have homes and a source of income.

This is the strange Sci-Fi modern day version of the Great Depression because these are stranger times, and we need to keep our bodies and souls as healthy as we can.

Good luck to all of us. We’re going to need it for the foreseeable future, and probably long after that.


Wade Hampton Miller

PS: Acoustic guitar content - Mammoth Music in downtown Anchorage has some exceptionally good-sounding Martin guitars, and their business seems slow enough to where they might open to some haggling on prices, provided that it’s polite and friendly haggling and not abrasive lowball verbal assaults trying to harass them into selling so cheaply that they make no profit.

During this rolling worldwide crisis I think we should all try to make an effort to support our local brick and mortar music stores while they can still sort of keep their doors open. Because they might not ever be able to reopen them if they have to close down again.

They provide the lifeblood of instruments and effects that give substance to our visions of musical glory, and they provide an informal gathering spots for us and our odd little subculture of hopes and dreams and pulse-pounding rhythms that inject endorphins into every system in our bodies, jumpstarting us to grasp what seems out of reach but really isn’t. Imagination, raw emotion, harmony and reconciliation, searching for redemption amid the commonplace - our endorphins both assist in those quests and are active participants once we get there.

Love and forgiveness reward us with endorphins, and we help maintain our species with them, too.

Looking at Musicians Friend and Sweetwater catalogs, diverting as that can be, can’t replace the endorphin buzz that you get when you sit down and play a magnificent guitar in your lap and discover some guitar lick falling out of your fingers that you’ve never played before.

I met one of the best friends that I fell in with after college in a tiny little music store in downtown Anchorage that mysteriously closed down and vacated one night and disappeared like Cinderella’s pumpkin coach at midnight, never to be seen again.

That was 1985, and he and I have been in bands together and playing duo gigs and sitting around my living room since then.

He’s a dentist who works for the Alaska Native Hospital, who’s never lived anywhere near me. I’m a Kansas City native, not an Alaska Native, and he and I never would have met if we hadn’t bumped into each other at that music store and immediately started cracking each other up.

Hard to do that looking at a catalog or tapping at the computer keyboards.

So this is my own personal plea: do what you can to keep your local music stores in business, because if they have to close their doors again between now and next summer most of them will never open again.

Thanks.

“Thank you Deacon Wade. A remarkably off-topic but verbally extravagant off the cuff sermon.”

“Thank YOU, pastor.”

“Sit your butt DOWN, Deacon Wade. Now, if the congregation will open your Hymnals to Hymn #405, “All Things Bright And Beautiful”....


Sorry for hijacking the thread, but I guess I needed to express that.


whm

[Kitkatjoe]

Originally Posted by Wade Hampton

Honestly I have no idea, because I already own more guitars than I need and have only been in one music store since the pandemic lockdown orders in Anchorage were partially lifted a month and a half ago. When I was in there I only played the Martins, because playing Martins always cheers me up.

Sorry that I can’t give you any insights, but it’s nice to have a touch of musical normality in these dark and dysfunctional days, however fleeting those musical glimpses might be.

Keep your spirits up. Don’t let rising guitar prices bring you down. Everything made in China is going to getting costlier because of low energy but rising trade war tensions that both governments are using to keep their restive populations focused on an exterior foe because that’s much easier to do than solve the internal problems nagging at both nations.

Neither of the governments are completely at fault, neither of them are right about everything.

Plus there are the billions of ordinary people like all of us, most of us with no obvious political axes to grind, just trying to get through this stultifying pandemic strangeness that all of us are suffering from, regardless of political affiliation or nation of origin.

We all just want to get through this. That’s all. We’re social animals and this is suffocating all of us, and we want and need to get past this.

So hang in there and maybe we should count our blessings for now, those of us who still have homes and a source of income.

This is the strange Sci-Fi modern day version of the Great Depression because these are stranger times, and we need to keep our bodies and souls as healthy as we can.

Good luck to all of us. We’re going to need it for the foreseeable future, and probably long after that.


Wade Hampton Miller

PS: Acoustic guitar content - Mammoth Music in downtown Anchorage has some exceptionally good-sounding Martin guitars, and their business seems slow enough to where they might open to some haggling on prices, provided that it’s polite and friendly haggling and not abrasive lowball verbal assaults trying to harass them into selling so cheaply that they make no profit.

During this rolling worldwide crisis I think we should all try to make an effort to support our local brick and mortar music stores while they can still sort of keep their doors open. Because they might not ever be able to reopen them if they have to close down again.

They provide the lifeblood of instruments and effects that give substance to our visions of musical glory, and they provide an informal gathering spots for us and our odd little subculture of hopes and dreams and pulse-pounding rhythms that inject endorphins into every system in our bodies, jumpstarting us to grasp what seems out of reach but really isn’t. Imagination, raw emotion, harmony and reconciliation, searching for redemption amid the commonplace - our endorphins both assist in those quests and are active participants once we get there.

Love and forgiveness reward us with endorphins, and we help maintain our species with them, too.

Looking at Musicians Friend and Sweetwater catalogs, diverting as that can be, can’t replace the endorphin buzz that you get when you sit down and play a magnificent guitar in your lap and discover some guitar lick falling out of your fingers that you’ve never played before.

I met one of the best friends that I fell in with after college in a tiny little music store in downtown Anchorage that mysteriously closed down and vacated one night and disappeared like Cinderella’s pumpkin coach at midnight, never to be seen again.

That was 1985, and he and I have been in bands together and playing duo gigs and sitting around my living room since then.

He’s a dentist who works for the Alaska Native Hospital, who’s never lived anywhere near me. I’m a Kansas City native, not an Alaska Native, and he and I never would have met if we hadn’t bumped into each other at that music store and immediately started cracking each other up.

Hard to do that looking at a catalog or tapping at the computer keyboards.

So this is my own personal plea: do what you can to keep your local music stores in business, because if they have to close their doors again between now and next summer most of them will never open again.

Thanks.

“Thank you Deacon Wade. A remarkably off-topic but verbally extravagant off the cuff sermon.”

“Thank YOU, pastor.”

“Sit your butt DOWN, Deacon Wade. Now, if the congregation will open your Hymnals to Hymn #405, “All Things Bright And Beautiful”....


Sorry for hijacking the thread, but I guess I needed to express that.


whm

Your words are very comforting. I needed this.

[TDavis]

Originally Posted by Wade Hampton

When I was in there I only played the Martins, because playing Martins always cheers me up.

That made me smile. Thank you for that nugget, Mr. Hampton.

[Earl49]

Prices go up, usually every year. The price of my 1990 Martin J-40 increased to the point where I technically made a small profit over the original purchase price when selling 27 years later (ignoring denied warranty repairs that I had to cover and the time value of money).

[ljguitar]

Originally Posted by Dbone

What has your guys’ experience/observations been with the price of guitars generally?

Hi Db
I expect prices to go up with regularity…

When I was 20 years old, a Martin D-28 sold for around $400 with a hard shell case. In 1992 when I commissioned my Olson it cost $3050 (with a pickup installed).

Since they were made, both have increased in price quite a bit.

I expect prices to go up, if not annually, then at least every-other year.

[Br1ck]

I remember walking into Gryphon one day and saw my first $3K guitar. It was a Collings. Shocking. I never looked at D 45s and such, but I think an HD 28 was about $2500 at the time.

Those percentage increases every year add up. I remember if I took in a soda bottle, and a quarter, I walked out of the store with a coke and a comic book.

Geeze, I'm turning into my Grandpa. It is a shame when exchange rates and tariffs make things we like more expensive. But you have some really good Canadian builders at a variety of price points.

[tonyo]

Winter is coming

[Dbone]

Originally Posted by Martin_F

The Yamaha FG Red Labels also went up between $150 and $200 in Canada, along with the LL’s and that series. My guess is that there was a price raise across the board to account for our low dollar lately.

Price changes are tough because you start to creep up and you get into more competition with other guitars. However, Martin raises their prices just about every year too. The MAP in Canada is usually fairly equal to the US, but the difference is that dealers in the US will bargain on those prices some. In Canada you are lucky if anyone will do below MAP.

Martin

Yeah, I agree...Trying to bargain on guitars in Canada seems almost taboo...lol...I get the impression it’s very different in the US given the higher volume of guitars that are likely being sold at down there when compared to our market...Higher volumes perhaps make up for the slimmer margins etc...

I haven’t follow increases all that much in general over the years. This just struck me as a large increase. 600 dollars on a 56? They can’t be doing that every year, that’s for sure...Their circle of buyer will get even thinner if they do I think.

[Dbone]

Originally Posted by Wade Hampton

Honestly I have no idea, because I already own more guitars than I need and have only been in one music store since the pandemic lockdown orders in Anchorage were partially lifted a month and a half ago. When I was in there I only played the Martins, because playing Martins always cheers me up.

Sorry that I can’t give you any insights, but it’s nice to have a touch of musical normality in these dark and dysfunctional days, however fleeting those musical glimpses might be.

Keep your spirits up. Don’t let rising guitar prices bring you down. Everything made in China is going to getting costlier because of low energy but rising trade war tensions that both governments are using to keep their restive populations focused on an exterior foe because that’s much easier to do than solve the internal problems nagging at both nations.

Neither of the governments are completely at fault, neither of them are right about everything.

Plus there are the billions of ordinary people like all of us, most of us with no obvious political axes to grind, just trying to get through this stultifying pandemic strangeness that all of us are suffering from, regardless of political affiliation or nation of origin.

We all just want to get through this. That’s all. We’re social animals and this is suffocating all of us, and we want and need to get past this.

So hang in there and maybe we should count our blessings for now, those of us who still have homes and a source of income.

This is the strange Sci-Fi modern day version of the Great Depression because these are stranger times, and we need to keep our bodies and souls as healthy as we can.

Good luck to all of us. We’re going to need it for the foreseeable future, and probably long after that.


Wade Hampton Miller

PS: Acoustic guitar content - Mammoth Music in downtown Anchorage has some exceptionally good-sounding Martin guitars, and their business seems slow enough to where they might open to some haggling on prices, provided that it’s polite and friendly haggling and not abrasive lowball verbal assaults trying to harass them into selling so cheaply that they make no profit.

During this rolling worldwide crisis I think we should all try to make an effort to support our local brick and mortar music stores while they can still sort of keep their doors open. Because they might not ever be able to reopen them if they have to close down again.

They provide the lifeblood of instruments and effects that give substance to our visions of musical glory, and they provide an informal gathering spots for us and our odd little subculture of hopes and dreams and pulse-pounding rhythms that inject endorphins into every system in our bodies, jumpstarting us to grasp what seems out of reach but really isn’t. Imagination, raw emotion, harmony and reconciliation, searching for redemption amid the commonplace - our endorphins both assist in those quests and are active participants once we get there.

Love and forgiveness reward us with endorphins, and we help maintain our species with them, too.

Looking at Musicians Friend and Sweetwater catalogs, diverting as that can be, can’t replace the endorphin buzz that you get when you sit down and play a magnificent guitar in your lap and discover some guitar lick falling out of your fingers that you’ve never played before.

I met one of the best friends that I fell in with after college in a tiny little music store in downtown Anchorage that mysteriously closed down and vacated one night and disappeared like Cinderella’s pumpkin coach at midnight, never to be seen again.

That was 1985, and he and I have been in bands together and playing duo gigs and sitting around my living room since then.

He’s a dentist who works for the Alaska Native Hospital, who’s never lived anywhere near me. I’m a Kansas City native, not an Alaska Native, and he and I never would have met if we hadn’t bumped into each other at that music store and immediately started cracking each other up.

Hard to do that looking at a catalog or tapping at the computer keyboards.

So this is my own personal plea: do what you can to keep your local music stores in business, because if they have to close their doors again between now and next summer most of them will never open again.

Thanks.

“Thank you Deacon Wade. A remarkably off-topic but verbally extravagant off the cuff sermon.”

“Thank YOU, pastor.”

“Sit your butt DOWN, Deacon Wade. Now, if the congregation will open your Hymnals to Hymn #405, “All Things Bright And Beautiful”....


Sorry for hijacking the thread, but I guess I needed to express that.


whm

I don’t know about you guys but during a recent guitar purchase during the pandemic I didn’t even have the heart to bother trying to dicker in price. Normally I would try but I am wanting to be supportive to small businesses right now in general. For this reason I thought it would be bad form to bother, and it would not have been good for my conscience. Like you, I feel pretty fortunate to have a roof over my head and secure income at this time. I’m not gonna try and grind businesses down on their margins. At least not right now ;-0

[RP]

Originally Posted by Dbone

I don’t know about you guys but during a recent guitar purchase during the pandemic I didn’t even have the heart to bother trying to dicker in price. Normally I would try but I am wanting to be supportive to small businesses right now in general. For this reason I thought it would be bad form to bother, and it would not have been good for my conscience. Like you, I feel pretty fortunate to have a roof over my head and secure income at this time. I’m not gonna try and grind businesses down on their margins. At least not right now ;-0

I don't "dicker"; I just ask for their best price and see what they say. They know their profit margins, and I don't so they're either going to offer a discount or not...

[Mirosh]

Tariffs (taxes on imports) are becoming a bigger part of the international trade picture, so prices will go up. Who pays that tax? The buyer of that product, or similar products.

[Dbone]

Originally Posted by RP

I don't "dicker"; I just ask for their best price and see what they say. They know their profit margins, and I don't so they're either going to offer a discount or not...

That’s what I meant. I would typically do the same...Ask for their best price...I guess I was a little too slang there ;-0

[Rev Roy]

Originally Posted by RP

I don't "dicker"; I just ask for their best price and see what they say. They know their profit margins, and I don't so they're either going to offer a discount or not...

Yup...me, too.