Guitar shop pricing gone mad!

I haven't understood the guitar market for a while now.

Going by Reverb/Craigslist/Facebook Marketplace/etc. , guitars I bought used....even recently....have at least quadrupled in value. Am I sitting on a gold mine? Probably not.

Flip side, I found an axe I wanted on Reverb. Seller was a one hour drive away, so I reached out and asked whether I could pick it up. The guy flatly said no, and the guitar is still listed at the same price six months later. I don't get it. He had a cash in hand, full asking price sale on the table and blew it off.

The entire environment seems fake.
 
Yeah, the used guitar market went bananas over Covid, and I still see sellers trying to get the same money for them now. I also see guitars sitting for a long time. Obviously there are still plenty of people with money that can just buy whatever whenever, but I'm assuming most of those people don't want the same 80s Charvel I'm looking at. I think the buying dollars out there has shrunk a lot. In theory we'd see a correction to the prices, but I think it's going to take a long time. There are far fewer listings out there as well.
 
ElectricPhase said:
I haven't understood the guitar market for a while now.

Going by Reverb/Craigslist/Facebook Marketplace/etc. , guitars I bought used....even recently....have at least quadrupled in value. Am I sitting on a gold mine? Probably not.

Flip side, I found an axe I wanted on Reverb. Seller was a one hour drive away, so I reached out and asked whether I could pick it up. The guy flatly said no, and the guitar is still listed at the same price six months later. I don't get it. He had a cash in hand, full asking price sale on the table and blew it off.

The entire environment seems fake.
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I spotted a s/h amp for sale not long ago, locally, online, so messaged the seller to ask the usual questions. To cut a long story short, he asked me to pay money directly into his bank or with Paypal or something. "But I have cash in my pocket.." In the end I asked the question, "Are you some sort of scammer?", to which he replied that he thought I was! I was about to tell him to just forget it when he PM'd me to say that I could go to his place to pick it up. He was actually a nice guy, but was fed up with people trying to scam him. What is the World coming to?
 
I don't know if anyone else has ever done this but I searched "Gibson Les Paul" on Reverb just to see how many were out there and came back with a 8,802! of those that were over $2500 there were 6,120 guitars! 20 of them asking over $100,000 and that's just reverb.

Subsequently I searched Fender Stratocaster and came up with over 18,000 results. Seems to me the Reverb marketplace has a lot of guitars that have outrageous price tags attached to them.

There are plenty of guitars on the used market that are in my opinion over priced because of whatever. I understand the collector market and could care less about that.

I want a guitar to play it, have it look good and be a solid instrument! I don't know how others feel... I'm just one of those guys that feels if I'm paying over $2,500 for a quality instrument it's just not worth it to me and your paying too much.
 
I have the big 60 birthday coming up in the not to distant future and quite fancy buying another Les Paul as a gift to myself. As nobody else around me will be bothered to ask what I would like. :) I see s/h guitars listed for what I think is a bit more than they are worth, and I guess the seller/owners must be taking a chance on things financially. "If they can ask that stupid price then so can I...."

What I would like to ask is, if you were selling and somebody contacted you and said, "Your guitar looks amazing, I can see that it has been for sale for weeks (or even months), I can't afford your asking price, but I have £$xxxx amount of cash in my pocket, would you be interested in doing a deal?" Would that come across as rude? The seller can always just say no and I would happily accept that, mail them back and thank them for their time, and wish them well.

I believe that we are all in a privileged position just to be in this community as I would say that any Fractal equipment is a luxury, but I feel that the bubble has to burst on guitar pricing and that it should come back down to a more realistic honest level.

I can dream.
 
Well if you're selling guitars for food or rent, you're doing it wrong, something is out of whack. Short of that, people can wait, why not? Unless they get sick of that, give up, and resign themselves to taking a bath.
 
Dixiethedog said:
I believe that we are all in a privileged position just to be in this community as I would say that any Fractal equipment is a luxury, but I feel that the bubble has to burst on guitar pricing and that it should come back down to a more realistic honest level.

I can dream.
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I fear that prices coming down substantially probably is a dream, at this point, for the same reasons I mentioned in that earlier post.

Sure, there are some $4,000 or $6,000 guitars that nobody wants badly enough to pay that kind of cash. That's just manufacturers pricing themselves out of the market.

But if we consider the $2,000 guitars that used to be $1,500? Or the $1,500 guitars that used to be $1,200?

I'm pretty sure most of that comes from each dollar being less valuable, which means you have to use more dollars to obtain the same value of guitars, or groceries, or garden-tools, or...well, anything.

If I'm right about that, the current guitar prices are at a "realistic honest level"; or at least, they're no more dishonest or unrealistic than they ever were.

Barring deflation (which we don't want, for a variety of reasons), any decrease in the value of your money is basically a "one-way ratchet effect": You're stuck with it, and must merely adjust to the "new normal" over time. Once your currency has been devalued, you've shot your wad, and your only option is to wait until economic growth brings the "objective" value of the goods and services back up, until it's proportional to your steroidally-inflated money supply. And you can't use "monetary stimulus" to speed that process up, 'cause that's just more "hair of the dog": It prolongs the problem and pushes the solution further out-of-sight.

(Sorry, party-boy Keynes; but your pal Friedrich has you dead-to-rights on this one.)


What does it look like, when natural, non-stimulated economic growth brings your economy back into proportion with your money supply?

It doesn't look like prices coming down. That never happens. You will never again see a fountain-drink cost a nickel, like it did in the 1950's (or whenever that was).

What it looks like, is income figures rising to be proportionate to the increased cost of everything.

So those $2,000 guitars won't drop back to $1,500; but, maybe after some years go by, people who used to make $75K will be making $100K, and the guitars will be as buyable as they used to be, relative to incomes.

(Y'know, if AI doesn't drive us all out of our jobs. Man, I'm full of sweetness and light this morning.)
 
I tend to eyeball amps more than guitars and it seems like the prices on tube amps increase weekly. Boogie has to be the worst. I guess since they are a Gibson brand now, that make sense. I know tube might be a little difficult to get these days, but most places have them back in stock. Holy crap! I just looked on Sweetwater out of curiosity, and a Mark V 35 combo is $2799. It may be a great little amp but the full size Mark V's were less than that a few years ago. Not talking 5 or 6, maybe like pre-covid.
Take the insane prices on Reverb/Craigslist/Facebook with a grain of salt. That may be what people are asking, but what they are getting at the end of the say is different. I see some used stuff in Nashville start high, but it sits and is bumped to the top daily. Eventually it comes down until it goes.
 
I bought a John Lennon Signature 65 Casino model in flawless condition for 2K maybe 3-4 years ago.
I just saw one listed for $14.5K…
That’s just plain ridiculous.

Saw another one originally listed for $8.5K marked down to 4.5K….WTH.
 
I spotted a luthier hand-built LP junior-style guitar on Reverb a little while ago, so bookmarked it so that I could find the advert and double-check the guitar at my leisure. When I double-checked it out I liked the advertised price and decided that I needed it. I duly mailed the seller and soon after received a reply. Miraculously in the blink of an eye, the price had suddenly changed to a more expensive amount. "Eh, what?" I thought, and mailed the seller back to ask what was going on. To cut a long story short, he more or less told me that that was the price and that he had not changed it. I told him that I had a screen shot of the original advert which did not go down well. He reported me to Reverb for being abusive. :)
I was never rude to him but just thought that he was an idiot. But one lost sale for a greedy seller.
 
ElectricPhase said:
I haven't understood the guitar market for a while now.

Going by Reverb/Craigslist/Facebook Marketplace/etc. , guitars I bought used....even recently....have at least quadrupled in value. Am I sitting on a gold mine? Probably not.

Flip side, I found an axe I wanted on Reverb. Seller was a one hour drive away, so I reached out and asked whether I could pick it up. The guy flatly said no, and the guitar is still listed at the same price six months later. I don't get it. He had a cash in hand, full asking price sale on the table and blew it off.

The entire environment seems fake.
Click to expand...
Was talking to a guy on Reverb about a Maag EQ. In the 3k dollar range. I figured the price he was asking minus tax and reverb fees and offered him that in cash and to come pick it up. The answer? “Im not selling this for that little”.
 
Buying most production guitars is a mugs game these days. As someone earlier mentioned, i think the real skin is in the small shop builders now. With some E-II models reaching $4k CAD and Indo-imports coming in at close to, or over $2k and $3k + for Strandbergs, the smaller shop custom builders are way better value. I ordered a full custom from Aviator Guitars in the Czech Republic last year and landed cost including duties/taxes was just over $4k and this was a full custom build with a few specific details! I'm much more inclined to spend high dollars this way than on these insane retail prices for production runs, that or the good old used market.

I always advise people to check the historical sales on an item on Reverb, when some goon lists something way over price you can look at the item history and see if you're being bagged.
 
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