The Guitologist man if nothing else get a hold of the main people at guitar center and see if you could fix the stuff instead of doing that shit and let you donate it to underprivileged kids that are trying to learn maybe you and them could start a new program I would love to do it for the chattanooga area where I live
Just subbed after seeing this! Thanks! I went to Gibson's channel and guitar center and gave them a piece of my mind.... And I will occasionally do so, PATHETIC....
I’ve always been a fan of Guitar Center, and I’m not sure this might just be a local store issue. But, this really disappoints me with the GC brand! Wow! I’m with you Brad! They had so many better options, potentially, than destroying these instruments, just to keep someone, anyone, a kid who’s parents can’t afford to buy them a decent musical instrument, from using it! Greedy mofo’s! To put profit on new instrument sales ahead of charity is a really crappy mindset! No one expects GC to lose money, but, making one underprivileged child’s dream a reality would not harm their company. In fact, the PR alone might actually get them some free advertising and make people want to shop there! Pathetic and sad! Thanks Brad for bringing this issue to light! Rock on!
stan broniszewski - Paul Stanley had a supply or purpose made Gibson Mauraders that were specially made to break up when he smashed them. There were boxes of them wherever they toured.
I heard that they don't use a hammer. They take the employee who has made the fewest sales that week and just bash the instruments over his/her head before throwing them in the dumpster. Then they throw the instruments in the dumpster too.
That's just disgusting, how could you supposedly be a musician, or at least work at a music store, and have the stomach to destroy and discard instruments like that. I wouldn't be able to take a hammer to a instrument like that.
In England, during the 90's and early 2000's shops would put bleach on food in skips (dumpsters) that was still in date. Also clothes and shoes were slashed with blades. Nowadays, some of the food goes to food banks as so many people rely on them due to low wages and austerity.
wiiqwertyuiop and Kowler That's nothing. I read that Gibson stacks hundreds of guitar which might have minor - cosmetic - damage and have the fork lift drive over them all. This is a daily occurence.
This really hurts to be honest.... So many people out there are not able to afford even a no name guitar no matter how much they wish to play a guitar... and yet guitar center destroys a true Gibson Les Paul just because of... reasons... wow. people are wasteful. They have always been. I'll be really interested in your restoring process! Make something unique of it, something really beautiful! \m/
JJ's One Girl Band more than people, it's big companies like guitar center that are so wasteful. Who cares if they loose money, that less Paul could've made someone so happy, the guy in the video even has proof it had no damage before it was destroyed.
It's such a shame they destroy these instruments instead of selling them at reduced prices it's such a ridiculous practice. All the workmanship that goes into these and they take hammers to them. I appreciate what you do. Shame on guitar center and the other companies that allow this.
It's a fact of life in retail. If something comes in damaged, the retailer wants credit for it from the wholesaler/distributer/manufacturer. The deal is to destroy it and get credit. If the retailer keeps it and resells it as damaged, he doesn't get the credit. They do this with unsold books & magazines and nearly anything that is damaged including appliances, musical instruments, toy, clothing, and so on and so forth.
Go on eBay and track down a olp mm1...going anywhere from 75.00...to 250.00....was a licensed Ernie Ball Music Man Axis Clone....had bad ass stick pickups and a great neck!...best guitar I've played for the money!...still own three....sold one...love em
It's all about greed. They don't care about helping anybody. If they can't get they money they want, they would rather see it trashed than to see someone get use out of it. I worked at a Kmart when I was young, and they would NEVER give employees broken merchandise and would fire you if they caught you taking something from the dumpster that they threw away. Sad.
It's better to waste 1, then having people scratch 100 so that they lower the price by half. Sometimes things that don't make sense are done, because alternatives don't work.
I just went this past weekend to guitar center in Lexington ky to buy a martin and they were the rudest ppl I've dealt with ever. So found little guitar store cpl miles away called Willcutt guitars and man I got the most beautiful sounding martin I've ever heard. The old man who sold it to me was amazing. So I will never enter another guitar center ever again. Specially after watching this.
The smaller shops tend to be more friendly and more insightful when someone comes into their shop. They don't get as many customers, so they tend to care about appeasing everyone who comes in.
Dude I have two local guitar stores, one is a Gibson, fender, Taylor exclusive custom shop dealer, lil up tight, but the other has all sorts of gear with super down to earth employees, it’s the small shops that are the greatest
Dudes!... I live in Australia, so it's no thing to me either way, but maaan, Guitarologist screwed everyone cottoned onto dumpster-diving over good n proper. I'd be pissed, if I were one of you!
I have dumpster dived at GC a few times. The first time was following the advice of one of the sales guys there. Someone said that they had old school Peavey bulletcases for sale. When I went there they were gone. Sales guy told me to look in the dumpster. And sure enough there was one. Scratched but I used it to ship an 80s Peavey I sold on TB.
I got 2 Taylor guitars in a dumpster behind a guitar center year's ago. My friend worked there and told me they were there if I wanted them. I took them to a luthier and he told me he would fix one free of charge if I gave him the nicest one. I said sure and I'm still playing it 10 years later.
Where in the hell was that one ...in the glass display case... It must have been meant for Sam Ash thats the only store i find those weird guitars... Actually in tune wtf
Waste. Seriously. If you are capitalist then you know our money is based on product and free enterprise. It takes product and tangible substance to back dollars, like precious metals, natural resources and land. The economy has turned into a free for all in recent years, abandoning the sensible ways of the past to follow rumors, greed, and feelings. It is sad they will be able to write this off for when you ponder the realness of what is being done in reality is fraud but yet protected by red tape bureaucratic loopholes for tax write offs. Flat tax would keep things like this from happening. Best of luck with the Gibson restoration
I'm a retired guy that works at Guitar Center and you are full of shit. We do not toss scrached guitars. We send back to manufacture. Don't know what you found but it's not standard practice at all...trust me. Since GC doesn't have staff to do headstock repairs Gibson most likley asked to discard guitar taht was damaged in shipping you dumbass. GC lets all players come in and play guitars that no other music store on the planet would allow.. Be happy you found a guitar and stop trashing GC as you are clueless.
We live in a throw away society and its sad because I enjoy fixing things I just fixed my neighbors 700 expresso machine and it feels good to accomplish something like that I have repaired cars and trucks at ford dealers for the last 27 years and love watching you fix stuff so keep up the good work
Agreed. I just recently started doing repairs in Brooklyn and you wouldnt believe the things ive seen thrown to the curb here. Mostly surround sound stuff from people moving and what not, but yeah, Throw Away Society in full effect. Thanks for posting this. I've been checking out your vids for a while, and this one had me pretty triggered. Keep it up man, you might open the right persons eyes ;)
yes fixing stuff is the best feeling. or re purposing old stuff. Corporate greed and waste go hand in hand unfortunately. you would not believe the amount of usable good food that is thrown away at restaurants (where I work) as well.
One thing I think would make a really cool design on the back of the destroyed neck would be to glue it back together and then go to the craft store and get some fake Gold Leaf to apply to the cracks for a Kintsugi effect on the back of the neck. Kintsugi is the Japanese art form in which breaks and repairs are treated as part of the object's history, and that would only add to the fact that this guitar was literally thrown away and you brought it back and made it even more beautiful.
I remember, way back when, how there were certain kids who, during lunch hour at school wouldn't eat certain things. However, if someone asked them for it they'd say no, and throw it away! I always wondered at what was going on in their head. Some folks are just crippled inside. This video reminds me of those kids. They must have grown up to become music store owners/managers, eh?
Sadly the manufacturers/distributors usually tell the retailers that they must do this, or they will be sued. It's in a legal contract. I work in the IT industry, similar happens on extremely high end gear. Even the IT garbage processing people are under contract to not let anyone take certain branded equipment from their garbage storage or they will be sued too. It's crazy. Cheaper to throw away and 'protect the brand' as they say. But such extreme waste when there are very worthy places who would love such equipment.
Why? It's just a plank with a name on it! I say it's a waste of time and money. Get yourself a nice used Korean Cort M600 for $/€200-250 and you'll have a much nicer guitar. ruclips.net/video/ndxWJPB1UJY/видео.html
Making that Gibson playable just so you could take it with you back to that Guitar Center ostensibly to try some of their amps would be a hilarious video.
Don't do a good job, just fill, sand, and rewire on the body. Glue the neck and sand it, don't refinish it. In other words, make it playable, but, leave the damage somewhat still visible so they can tell it's the one they junked.
There's this Guitar Summit thing you really ought to speak on this to bring awareness there's a few Guitar Guys that Mod Guitars Homegrown Luthiers that would do the fixes for free to give away to others..I left another comment toward the end I have a few ideas that would help you get this out their you nailed it. If folks all over took pics of the stuff GC is trashing there could be a WALL of SHAME for G.C. get a couple of bigger names on board this could go vial & cause a change "The Food Babe" has done some great work like getting Subway to stop putting Foam in the bread & beaver butt in her husbands fav Beer. You did a great job w/this. But a mini documentary I believe would be a far greater tool to show the Rot as you so righty put it. Please read the other post .
I worked for 25yrs in auto dealerships, did the same thing worst travesty I ever seen was cash for clunkers. We destroyed thousands of cars & trucks that were perfectly fine. Your a good dude & can see the way things are done in this pagan society. Peace & Pray for Fla.
Cash for clunkers was actually APPLAUDED by environmentalists! They are some of the dumbest fucking people around sometimes. Huge waste of resources and energy that actually HURT struggling families who could have used the economic benefits of having those transportation options available in the market. Yeah, you get it.
"[The] benefits of having [those cars] on the market" - exactly. "Cash for Clunkers" drove up the average price of a used car tremendously. And who has multiple thousands of dollars laying about ready to buy a replacement car should something catastrophic happen? It also turned out to be a nice pay-day for banks and other corporations that made auto loans, not to mention the payday for Detroit/Tokyo/Seoul.
That's bizarre, because it strikes me as being rather anti-environmental if the cars were just thrown away rather than parted out and used to repair other cars, or at least the materials recycled. That's hugely wasteful. If they were worried about the pollution issues of older cars, they could have sent them to a shop to gut them and convert them to custom electric cars (there are several shops that do this). However, of course these custom electric cars built from old chassis / bodies have issues with passing safety tests, and also legal issues around driving them on the road, partly because of the custom nature of the conversion. There should be a way to standardize or streamline this process, have good safety / inspection tests set up, and legislate so those "new" old cars can go back on the road, driveable with their new paperwork.
Corporate greed, profit before people, wonderful symptoms of our rapidly growing disposable society. Good of you to expose this type of crime. Keep up the good work!
I'd give anything for a Gold Top Lester, and yet here we are, a perfectly good one smashed to pieces and tossed in a dumpster. I hope you manage to save it. I'm just going to go hug my Epiphone in the other room...
I'll bet half the project guitars on Ebay were acquired thusly. I was buddy buddy with a guitar store owner in my youth and shipping insurance would pay for broken stuff then the store destroys beyond repair and he had to send a picture, back in the days of 14400 kbs dial up and scanning a polaroid or faxing it. the resolution was so bad on either you could send a pic of a random busted axe then have a project. Those guitars were fixed and used by youth groups at his church, 7 maybe 8 in total the whole time I knew him. It was always the indonesian or korean stuff that had shipping problems so they weren't gibsons by any stretch, but the were shiny and played nicely after he got done with them. Like you, he could not fathom such waste.
yes and i bet most of the cheap chinese guitar and electronic parts on ebay are stolen from the manufacture plant in china and passed out the back door. Black market parts are a huge business.
There's a thing though, where discarded boards and electronics components that don't meet spec end up being picked up from dumpsters and sold as new and genuine. They don't usually end up at major distributors, but occasionally that happens too, and they do end up in Huaqiangbei and from there on Ali and eBay. That however is not typical. A huge number are straight up fakes, where a different, functionally vaguely similar silicon ends up being repackaged and remarked, and China of course has its own manufacturers. Genuine items often end up in Huaqiangbei too because PCB manufacturing plants secure very good prices with component manufacturers by buying in millions, and end up dumping tens thousands of items of overstock at the end of production. In part, Western manufacturers such as STM have to offer much lower prices in China than to Western distributors for some of their catalogue to rival Chinese parts. Plus there's always the pick and place reject bin where the machine dumps ICs that couldn't be picked up automatically or fell off the vacuum picker - that's a fraction of a percent, but these bins end up being sold off and salvaged, though salvaging is not always performed in ESD-safe manner and you can end up with ICs that are genuine and work initially but fail quickly. Whether you are likely to get a fake, an overstock item, or a pick and place salvage, depends on the specific IC or component. I don't know about guitar parts, i think they're just cheap generic items with correspondingly none to minimal quality control, nothing stolen anywhere - after all it doesn't exactly cost millions to set up production of a cast or machined piece of metal or plastic, as opposed to ICs.
Fully fuctionional parts and completed product gets passed out the back door or thru dumpster and sold online all the time in china and other countries where big manufacturing plants are set up. Im not talking about defective or junk.
I’m just now seeing this video, it saddens me that this stuff happens. I’m disabled living on a very tight fixed income. I’m having an extremely hard time getting myself a Marshall head and cabinet that I’ve wanted since I was 18. If I saw that kind of stuff in my Dayton Guitar Center dumpster I’d take it and fix it myself. I can’t see things like that go to waste.
After we build a machine (CNC machine tools) for a customer, all the material associated with that project cannot be used on another machine because of accounting/tax/capital laws. We throw unopened boxes of bolts, screws, channel, conduit etc in the scrap hopper. We then sell that to the scrapper for pennies on the dollar. It makes me sick. I throw away a box of 1000 bolts, then for the new project I open a box of the *EXACT* same thing. The only difference is that the boxes have a different job number, and that is all. We have all brought it up to the company execs and they tell us there's nothing they can do. If we are caught using material that we have written off as capital expenditures, then we are in deep doo doo. It's not the company, it's the law.
Dumbass bureaucrats in government strike again. Bunch of dipshits with nothing good to do but justify their useless positions. Making rules that create waste and reward cronies is all they know how to do.
Sounds like you guys need to do a better job at determining how many bolts you need for each project. Your company is the one creating the waste, not the government (not that I'm defending the stupidity of government). I'm sure they sell bolts in boxes of less than 1000.
You have no idea how this business is ran. A job order has hundreds of options available. When the order is placed, the purchasing people have ordered exactly what is needed. As the customer develops his product, the components change with what we call a POC (purchase order change) and things are added or deleted. When the product is shipped, there are partial boxes of shit everywhere. That's what I meant when I say we throw them out. If the box of 1000 has 800 used, the remainder of that box is pitched. By law that material cannot be capitalized twice (or some kind or tax code thing). If its an unopened/unused it can be returned to the supplier and adjusted. And material that is in our inventory at the end of the fiscal year is taxable, so it makes no sense keeping it. There is much more than that, but that is just the basics and I am tired of typing
Stamp the headstock and body with a blem mark so it doesn't go out into the wild as being what it isn't. Guitars for Vets, kids learning guitar, lots of other places these could go.
I used to work in the camera dept. of a chain store in the 70's. They had a beautiful telephoto lens that retailed for 350.00. The focus ring didn't work correctly. They got permission to destroy it or sell to an employee for 7.00. I was the lucky employee who purchased it, took it home, tightened 3 set screws and it worked perfectly. Later I worked in a toy warehouse that serviced Toys R Us and dozens of other retailers. When GI Joe lost a shoe or Barbies Kitchen was missing a piece they were told to destroy them. I got permission to take them and donate them to Churches, the Salvation Army, Hospitals and my neighbor who was a State Trooper. After that no one could complain about my parties, he was on my side...
Why waste your time on junk? I stumbled on this video and can't get what the big deal is over stuff that belongs in the dumpster. One's man trash could very well belong in the trash. I'm a recycling guy. I like to make old like new. But give it up sometimes. Junk is junk. Let it go!!
Carl Bonham Did you reply to the wrong comment? I just don’t like seeing any guitar beat up like this. I didn’t say it was worth salvaging or anything like that but seeing a guitar purposely beat up sucks to look at.
What is up with this? Some people who can't afford a guitar can go do some dumpster diving and with a little effort, come up with a guitar they can play and cherish. Then along comes some guy who thinks it's a good idea to ruin it for everybody else by blowing it up on youtube.... Why do you think this should be done? What purpose does it serve? Maybe it gives you an inflated feeling of self importance or something. Now who gets a shot at finding a gem in a dumpster? Thanks Genius....
I know this is an older video. A personal story of mine. I knew a lady who's daughter wanted to learn guitar. I took an old,dented,pegs missing,broken tuning keys,sanded and painted with purple with acrylic paint,acoustic guitar, I had bought for like $20. I totally repaired,and refinished it,then gave it to her,no charge whatsoever. The point is,I wanted the daughter to learn on something decent. And being a mother of low income,to have a happy child. I believe in your cause,and wish you the best of luck.
I worked for GC like seven years ago and if a guitar was broken we just got our local luthier to fix it, and then we would just blow it out for cheap. If it came broken from the DC we'd usually just put it back in a box and send it back on the next returns pallet. I can't even imagine my store manager or district manager being willing to throw out a guitar with a broken headstock. Although the hammer hits on the body are troubling. I'm curious what's going on with GC now ... it wasn't a terrible place to work (my store at least) back in the day.
Wild stuff. I worked at a Landfill about 4 years. Anything from 40 yard closed top dumpsters full of new clothing from J C Pennys, to 30 & 40 yard dumpsters full, full of Ford Diesel Fuel Injector Pumps due to a design change to Radios with CD players were dumped because they would get a few bad radios per pallet of 1,000. It was cheaper to toss everything away & take a $20,000 tax right off than to pay to test each one. The stuff that was sold out of the Landfill was crazy. When I was in demolition, we were stripping out the Ford Tractor Pant in Romeo Michigan & the plant manager told us that he had already told the guards that the employee's were allowed to take anything they wanted, as long as it was carried out of the plant. The first thing I grabbed was a Cushman Cart- 3 wheeler out on a forklift & took it out to my truck. Also got about 50 Injector Pumps, New Radio's & Starters. This was a very wild time for us....
One of the other operators took one of the other forklifts out & took it. I did have a couple of catwalk 12" W x 8' L pieces cut off with a torch by a labor & took them out with the cart. The operator who ended up taking them has all kinds of ramp material because he owned a small trailer that held a JD dozer he used to do gravel drives & lot grading on the side. How could I be pissed, when every opened parts pallet & all the 20 yard open top dumpsters were filled with Ford Tractor parts. Remember when I said the plant manager cleared with the Ford security guards about us taking stuff from the plant? Well there were dozens of dumpsters & hundreds of pallets & part gondolas, with only a few missing parts, so it was considered trash, [only full plastic wrapped parts pallets were shipped to other plants. It was the largest legal score we had in the demo business.] [When I worked at the old Dodge Main Chrysler Plant in Detroit, which after all the demo, the new Caddilac assembly plant was built on the property], at any rate at Dodge main which had 6 or 7-8 story buildings, we were driving our pickup's in the large freight elevators, floor by floor loading up on snap-on tool boxes, full of snap-on tools. Both hand & small power tools. Job's like those two only came up like 4-5 times in my 30 years as an operating engineer. Wild times. As for the Dodge Main job, my salvage paid for a 2 bedroom. 1 bath & storage/utility room addition to our home. I think back then it cost us like $10,000, which was a lot back in 1980-81. Probably a $30,000 gig today. I can still remember the contractor's salesman asking if we wanted them or if we already had a bank setup to finance the addition, my wife at the time said, " No, my husband has cash." I was like please don't say that stuff. It's more regulated today.
I would love to be on a trash Truck in Houston or parts of Florida right now, all types of things that can be reused, repaired, cleaned up. A friends storage building flooded, & tons of Amps, Mesa Boogie Cab, tons of music memorabilia. My friend said it's poop water & left, after more thought he went back to get the cabs, he can replace the speakers, I put some thoughts in his head about saving what he could. Hate that.
I worked in Orlando Florida tearing down the electrical power plant & when the company stopped giving us perdium [I think I spelled it right] & paying our union benefits, we started picking up all the brass & copper that we could find which power plants have tons of & we had to hold our drivers license up while they took our pictures & that was back in 1991 or 92 after a hurricane that hit that state. Now it's hard to get stuff without someone watching or asking where you got the stuff from. Here in Michigan, you take your scrap in & have a 3-day wait period till your money is ready or you get a post dated check. When copper hit $3.90 per pound, that's when everything changed because in Detroit, they were cutting hot lines from electrical poles & taking the feeds to plants, which at the time that 1 1/2" 15' 3-line drops was worth a couple hundred bucks. It was sorta funny driving up to our job & all the shops in the area had no lights on. Pretty ballzy if you ask me.
If I'm a Master Builder at Gibson Memphis putting the utmost pride in my work and building everything to perfection. Then I find out perfectly good guitars are being destroyed per corporate policy over inventory issues?? Yeah, I'm not going to take that much pride in my work any more.
your first mistake is thinking Gibson has working master builders for production guitars,machines are the "builders" now,dont believe the hype,all Gibson Guitars are production reguardless what title its given,Historic,Custom ...etc,you want to believe the numbers are low,specially if you own one,reality is thousands are produced per day,corporate greed sets the value,certainly not quality and we the consumer are pawns.I own and play a LP traditional and I love it,problem is,Ive had at least 5 LPs that were absolute garbage,I had a new Custom with a twisted neck,Ive witnessed a standard with a nut cut so deep it almost was touching the first fret and more than one frets lifted,both likely left the factory like that.We are talking 3-4000 dollar guitars here,for a reseller to be told to destroy a guitar rather than repair, makes perfect sense if your into the product for less than what it costs to ship it back to be fixed
Dick L that sux for you. I own 5 different Gibson's and all are outstanding. Purchased three from GC, two from individuals. I took the time to play them in different tuning. Looked them over for obvious problems and made my purchases only when a guitar filled my need. My favorite Gibson happens to be my 2003 studio Les Paul and my 88 SG. Never buy a musical instrument without checking it out personally. You will be a much happier musician when you enjoy what you play on.
Haha master builder ! no such thing at Gibson. They are built by normal factory workers. If they weren't making guitars they could be putting cakes in boxes or screwing together car parts. The skilled luthiers line is something they bullshit with to justify the prices. 70% of a les paul is made by CNC robots
To think that most schools cannot afford music equipment, & here's this shitbag of a company not only throwing everything away, but taking the time out of their business day to really smash everything up until it's not useable or recoverable at all. Absolutely fucking gross business practices.
I used to work at Walmart and the reason for smashing things was to keep dumpster divers from bringing defective items back into the store and trying to get a cash refund. I've seen people even try to get a refund on dead plants they fished out of the dumpster.
All of that stuff is totally repairable, The headstock of my Martin D 18 was snapped off, A good luthier put it back on- he set dowels into the wood, so it stays in tune. Even if the neck is too trashed to fix, you can replace it. The keyboard might be repairable if you have all of the plastic parts, or you could replace some of the broken plastic. That Luna guitar was a really nice guitar
My favorite independent music store has a great guitar tech and he repaired the headstock on a Les Paul Raw Power, which I bought at a good discount. No need to trash 'em, repair 'em.
Brad, you should start a nonprofit to distribute these instruments to the needy. GC gets a receipt for declared value from you when they donate, and you get first crack at everything they otherwise would have destroyed. Would make for some great video footage too...get to see gear go from broken, to fixed, to the hands of happy kids.
I'm an amateur luthier and only work on my own guitars and friends for free. I've fixed an SG that had the body split right in half. The neck joint had a fairly clean break. I found it in the mid 1990's in a Sam Ash dumpster. With some glue, wood filler, and an opaque black paint job, it looked and played great. Gifted it to a friend who still owns it.
The manufacturing costs of all this equipment is really not substantial. But the potential profit loss from threatening a few sales actually IS. It's far better for the Bottom Line to wreck functioning gear than let people grab it and avoid paying their money.
I spoke to a guitar center employee after a really bad flood we had in my home town, and they had some damaged guitars... He told me that their guitars are insured, but in order to get their money for damaged guitars the insurance company requires that they destroy them... He said that he hates to do it, but they kinda have no choice...I'm not sure about how they handle "inventory issues", but that's what I've heard from an employee...
That's shameful. Nowhere near as bad, a couple of months ago I pulled a Yamaha Pacifica and a Washburn Idol out of skip (UK term for dumpster) at my local recycling centre. Nothing much wrong with either guitar and had the previous owner listed them on Gumtree for a small fee they'd have sold pretty quickly.....probably to me :)
This is a call made from the insurance company, Assurion, that deals with their pro coverage claims. These items are like "totalled cars" and are fully cost covered to the purchaser. If it's a customer that is... if it's store inventory then they are just getting screwed on the cost. Its why you see the hardware and pickups salvaged. Whether its store shrink or pro coverage, parts are salvaged because either way its "company inventory" and they can use parts for the repairs department.
Great video, terrible waste by these companies. I know for a fact that school music departments up and down this country and other country's would benefit greatly from these 'used' instruments. My brother is a school teacher in the U.K.
My Dad used to pick up old inexpensive damaged guitars and violins and fix them up to place in the hands of a young person who wanted to learn to play, but otherwise couldn't afford an instrument. He mentored kids like this and it was one of his favorite things to do. When he passed away, he left behind about a dozen old guitars in various states of disrepair. I don't have the luthier skills he did, so I found a local luthier who restored them to at least playing order. About half went to kids due to their size, i.e. beginner's or parlor guitars and the rest went to a local VA hospital, where they loan them out to Vets sort of like library books. You are point on about this sort of waste and all that could have gone to a worthy home.
I'm sure someone has said something like this in the comments before but to me this is a reflection of how our modern messed up society is. They don;t even understand the value of what a musical instrument is. They think it's about money. That's really messed up. This is what's wrong with the music industry of today as well. They think it's about money. Music and the instruments that are art in and of themselves is about reaching for things higher and deeper than ourselves. All the way from the creation of the instrument to the mesmerizing state a musician reaches (at certain very special moments) while playing it. Even if it's an assembly line cheapy. It still has a quality of being something to be respected and valued for what it is and does. These instruments were so very valuable even if sold as seconds but these "Rats" that contend "they are worth more destroyed to the Company than sold for less as seconds" are really sick in the soul. I'm sure this is done by "Higher ups" in the chain that do what they do for all the wrong reasons. They are not just wrong they are criminal.
It all has to do with tax accounting. It's not demonic or wrong or evil. If you think it's as bad as you wrote then do something about it. Get your state senator to change the state or federal tax codes to make it more beneficial to donate damaged instruments then to destroy them.
Hey, if you haven't started on the LP or the Luna, there's a super glue based product that does WONDERS when it comes to guitar repairs, it's called GluBoost. Allparts sells it, and StewMac might have it as well. Just look around youtube for tons of videos showing how it can be used in guitar repairs. I repaired an Alvarez with a broken headstock for a customer, he thought it was ruined. It wasn't a valuable guitar, but it had come from a member of his family who is no longer with us. I was able to repair the front side of the headstock so well that he couldn't actually tell it had been broken until I showed him that it is in fact the same headstock. He thought at first glance that I'd replaced the entire neck. Guy was so happy he wept.
I'm actually depressed after watching this. The guitars I've got are all home - made out of bits off've other guitars and to see the state of that Goldtop is actually distressing.
Rosewood is NOT hard to find. It just takes a lot of paperwork and extra cost to get any rosewood over the border, in either direction: IN or OUT. So if the guitar is ready, you need storage room for quite a long time until the paperwork from BOTH governments (exporting country AND importing country) is ready. The best solution is to used alternative woods like pau ferro. That's what Fender did.
Dude, when I was 14, I would have killed to have a Les Paul Goldtop, hell that'd still be a big deal to me. I was a poor kid living in a dump of a city, and music was the only thing I had to keep me going. I can't believe Guitar Center cares so little about these instruments that somebody would have cherished.
Guitar Center and all of their subsidiaries like Music and Arts deserve none of our business. I, personally, will not shop at either and I will be sure to dissuade anyone from shopping there. Shop local, folks, or deal with a reputable online retailer like Wildwood or Sweetwater.
Well said my friend. Shop local yes you may pay more but to me it's well worth it. When I go in my local music shop I'm always greeted warmly treated well and the staff is actually knowledgeable about what they are selling.
Guitar Center was purchased by Mitt Romney's business firm, Bain Capital which is tied to all sorts of other big companies like Burger King, Staples, Dominos Pizza, The Weather Channel, Dunkin Donuts, Burlington Coat factory and many more. When it comes to guitars I only buy used now, I won't give these companies my business, haven't in years.
Hey Brad,just wanted to tell ya ,I live in wpb Florida and I just went into the GC dumpster lol. Only thing decent in there was some stage speaker stands which I got by on stage stands and microphone stand with grip and a padded large combo amp sleeve. There was a small crap crate amp black model. But I left it.
Down with Guitar Center! I ordered a used 2008? gibson lp special w/case (squared edge 59 body with a 1960ish scratch plate). It was at another store so they sent it to one about 30 miles from me . I waited and waited for the phone call and after 2+ weeks go by I decide to call them. And after talking to 3 different people and on hold for 10 min someone picks up the phone and says "it's here" (me) Oh, when did it arrive? (GC) It looks like we've had it for about a week. (me) WTF, you don't call? When I looked at the guitar it was filthy. Some greasy mfer played this thing. The grime was just caked on, like somebody sprayed liquid garbage over the whole guitar and let it bake in the sun for a year or two. The case was after market and it didn't fit the special, it was for a regular les paul. The sales people didn't give a f%$# when I pointed these things out. I figured if it's a good guitar I can overlook these things and asked them if they'd throw in a set of strings. GC Says "If you want strings you have to buy them. The strings were so nasty I couldn't even test the guitar there. The Special had a factory TOM and a stoptail w/ strings top wrapped which created dents or grooves in the metal. GC says "the strings come top wrapped from the factory". I've never heard of that, but I'm an authority in the field. It took 6 hours to clean it and I discovered a vertical groove on the 13th or 14th fret and sure enough the g string fits perfectly in the groove. It looked like it was made with a nut file. How the hell would something like that happen? So, I brought the the guitar back and asked them to fix it or give me some sort of discount. They wouldn't do neither so, I returned it. Now they have a perfectly clean Gibson Les Paul Special with new strings (that I paid for, And they wouldn't refund me for the strings). All it needs is a new fret, I think a fret level to get below the groove would be a waste since the rest of the frets still had lots of life in them. I wonder what they did with that? Did they fix it? Did they hang it on the wall after I left (with the "maybe the next guy won't notice" attitude? Of course I could've easily had it fixed but it's not just the money it's the principal of the thing. Had these guys been cool with me (Sales 101) I would go there in the future to spend my $$$$. This isn't the only time I've had an issue with Guitar Center. Now I tell people go anywhere but there, it there's anywhere left. It's scumbags like this that put the mom and pops out of business. That being said FUCK Gibson too. Until they bring the prices back down to earth and and deliver a consistent and superb sounding/playing product.(which they claim to do anyways) Don't give them any new money. You can Still have yer Gibson just Buy used from owners not dealers.
Gibson have forsaken the little dealers long ago. They beat them up and beat them up to the point they could not reach their purchasing goals and were forced to stop carrying Gibson. Now, the only dealers large enough to carry them are the big boxes, and Gibson will share their fate, ultimately.
Ginger Beer And, that's a bad thing? Lol Every electric guitar is the tech of the 50s. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And, if it is broken, smash and toss. Lol
That's exactly what I'm saying. They sell it as if they are valuable state of the art high-tech equipment. In fact they are selling us a MYTH. Personally I wouldn't put too much energy and time in this piece of garbage. If you are planning to donate to the poor kids, donate something GOOD. If you want to donate a car, would you donate one that's ready for the shredder? This guitar served as a parts donor, just like cars that are a total loss. I must say that a good luthier could have saved the gold painted body, but except for the truss rod that neck was GONE. This guitar needed a new neck and all of the work of a reset. That's worth a lot of money. And that's why this guitar was declared a TOTAL LOSS. It hurts to see that, but sometimes you need to LET THINGS GO.
I'm sorry if this wasn't your intention..but... I'm brazilian and i'll try to visit the United States next year, spend as much time as possible and one of my goals is search in dumpsters for instruments. like a scavenger haha hope i find some good shit lol
This has been in my feed for a while but just got around to watching it today. Good info on what's going on at retailers and good approaches to your opinions on alternatives to destroying perfectly functioning goods. LOL Hope you didn't get the employee who talked to you in trouble, he was kinda put on blast. Seriously though, those goods were destroyed with conviction. You made someone mad.
Target in my area, used to fill a "huge" dumpster with returned bicycles each month. Then set it out in the parking lot to be picked up for landfill. Someone posted it on the local community website. They don't dump bikes anymore.
The Guitologist I imagine in the future all these places will have an incinerator in the basement where they can just burn all of their "inventory problems"...to really save money : GC could have their own trains like you see in the old movies with the conductor shoveling coal into the engine, only now they "go green" by shoveling in guitars instead of coal.
I am also a witness of this ! I built bikes for target for over a year and occasionally we would receive some in the mail that had torn boxes and when you got the bike out you can clearly see that the wheels are all bent and out of true from shipping. Luckily for my store I was able to tru the wheels pin straight and save my store from throwing out dozens of bikes like they have been doing all along.
Like the Marriott ferry that went to st thomas and ONLY rescued Marriott hotel guests!!!! Corporate has lost touch, a true shame... keep up the rants Brad!!
jimmy meyer that's different, since apparently the company was avoiding lawsuits by not taking the others. If you ask me, they should have made them sign liability wavers or something.
jimmy meyer if it was me in charge, I would have told the staff to go check on our guests, then "accidentally" left the door open/ramp down/whatever. If people climb onto the boat, AS STOWAWAYS, there's nothing I could have done.
Put a scarf joint half way down the neck - leave body as is, scratches, holes, dents, whatever - don't bother covering the control cavities - pull the bridge bushings and plug holes - re-drill for angled 50's wraparound bridge - put your favorite pickup in the bridge position - leave the neck pickup hole empty - one pot only (just volume, no tone) - Jam Out! - To me that sounds like the most fun guitar in the world
I go in and look. I buy parts on the net or shows and do real business with mom and pop stores or private sellers. This is the best music store in my area. www.chucklevins.com/
At least my local Guitar Centers sell 'As Is', I got a Warwick Corvette German 5 string for $150 which had a broken truss rod. As for what they throw in the dumpster I would have thought some of it is covered under ROHS and should be disposed off correctly to avoid it ending up in the landfill.
I posted this before the end of the,video. Such a good idea donating.
7 лет назад+1
Brian Marcou why donate when you can sell it for full retail? These manufacturers don't care, they want you to donate the instrument you paid for so you buy the new model at full retail.
Those manufacturers don't care is right, they buy entire wood forests for very little and produce guitars for next to nothing, they have cheap labor and cheap materials, they could destroy 100 guitars and wouldn't blink an eye because that $3500 guitar you bought earned them enough profit to build 100 more just like it.
its a Gibson ,its not an Indonesian/Asian guitar,the wood isn't cheap,cnc machines are 100s of thousands of dollars,some are closer to a million and labor cost in gibson is not low either,im not sure what your point is but all your points are incorrect. gibson has to comply with VERY strict rules regarding any wood they purchase,and they do.they had a very massive injunction due to "supposed" illegal rosewood purchasing and had all of their inventory removed by a branch of the the usa government.
I've been looking at buying a guitar, and now I know I will NEVER buy a guitar at guitar center! What a horrible atrocity it is to destroy beautiful instruments like that!
We have a Junior High school woodworking class in town here that Builds, or rebuilds Guitars, Basses, Drum shells and amp cabs ! I've donated two guitars , a Martin 12 that needs a truss rod and an Epi 6 that needs neck work. And two straight acoustics that only needed new homes ! Keeps Everybody Smilin' !!
This goes on in many industry's, especially grocery stores, food that is out of date but still good, Walmart is noted for keeping people away from dumpsters, everything you buy inside, can also be found out side, except for companys that actually pick up, broken, torn, opened or blemished, looks like the after concert of the who's dumpster, circa 68-70.
You're a good man, Brad, I hope your message gets through to someone. And by the way, I'm a capitalist too. It's too bad we have to qualify & make explanations for ourselves as such.
Capitalism has been responsible for the explosion in human quality of life. This is clear to any thinking individual, but it has flaws. Unnecessary WASTE should not be one of them. In fact, true capitalists hate waste. This isn't "capitalism" at all. This is some kind of twisted corporatism.
Just another reason to not shop at GC. They have systematically ruined most of the small music business. They deserve all the bad luck they have been having. I hated their business model from the beginning.
AudioAtmos to be honest most small businesses go under when the owner gets to retirement age and the children or grandchildren don't want nothing to do with the business. Owner liquidates and sells the business and moved to Florida. You can't blame GC or other major corporations all of the time
I have known employees of the Nashville Gibson plant and they all said that at one time, they did allow the employees to take the damaged guitars home where they would repair them to keep. They were prohibited from selling them. But you know how it always goes, some were sold with less than desired repairs and people were contacting Gibson about crappy craftsmanship. So the big boss sent them to the band saw ever since. My wife worked there for a while wiring BB King Lucille models. The guys that worked there said it was hard to watch, they really took pride in there work but had to do what they were told.
Although this sounds horrible, there are legal (primarily liability, but also tax) reasons for ensuring damaged goods cannot be remarketed. Ergo, they are usually destroyed beyond repair before disposal. I am an analytical chemist, and have "traded in" good analyzers (worth >$25K) after depreciation. I asked what they would do with old analyzers, answer - destroy them so they cannot be remarketed. I finally got permission to donate some items to local schools; but, had to go through both manufacturer and my company AND the school had to sign liability waivers. Not fun. BUT (the good news) things can be done. I am now employed with a non-profit that repurposes surplus medical goods (including equipment) for donation to qualified providers of charitable healthcare. The key is we can only donate, not sell, any item. Things can change! If you approach with manufacturer and distributor and ensure all items will ONLY be donated (never resold), you may actually get support as part of Corporate Social Responsibility actions (key phrase)! Kind of a long comment - my Paul Harvey moment, the rest of the story...
I used to dumpster dive Ibanez's dumpster here in my state where the main east coast distribute has been since the early 1970's. I made the mistake of posting it on a website and they fenced it in. But before they did I ended up with some cool stuff. One item being the entire effects line of the early 80s schematics in Japanese in a big binder. All hand drawn`. I sold it about 10 years ago. But one cool idea I used for necks that were useless to me or broken head stocks was to make a beer tap handles which are pretty cool.
These companies really are a long way away from adapting to a circular economy. Shameful they don't go thru 'the hassle' of giving these things to charity.
Too much paperwork for those folks to be charitable. Sure, all corporations talk big games concerning charity but when the checkbook comes out there is no pen and nothing comes of it.
A lot of businesses dump old gear, but they first bust it up so nobody else can use it. I was at Pitney-Bowes (mailing equipment office supplies) and saw employees carrying out all kinds of equipment, some still packed in unopened boxes, out to the dumpster. One guy was assigned to smash everything with a sledge hammer, from huge copy machines to brand new electronic scales, printers, mail sorters, etc. Afterwards they let me collect various electronic components such as digital displays, connectors, power supplies, cables, wiring, etc, (I'm a ham radio geek so I was in heaven).
@ very good. Thanks for the reply. IDK anything about chromatic harmonicas. I'm gonna have to research that. Sounds interesting. Have a safe and great July 4th. 🌞😎😊
Throwing a guitar in the trash because it has a scratch😂 guitars are gonna get scratched anyway. Oh yeh and if you were an employee told to break this guitar, why don’t u just put it in your car and take it home like wtf
This kind of thing happens in almost every big retail store. if they don't destroy it and try to keep it themselves they'll get the cops called on them for theft, doesn't matter that it's gonna be trash anyway. Plus usually the person who has to smash the stuff has to do it in front of a manager so they don't really have an opportunity to anyway
Mike Farrell i used to work in a guitar center they would let us take broken equipment all time. Made a lot of money reselling amps with small problems but we’re playable enough to get a pawnshop to buy them
They’ll arrest you for stealing. I worked at Panda Express for a bit and they said if you eat any of the still fresh food at the end of the day you’d be fired and they’d call the cops on you.
"Brandon joel: They’ll arrest you for stealing. I worked at Panda Express for a bit and they said if you eat any of the still fresh food at the end of the day you’d be fired and they’d call the cops on you." that's like absolute disrespect for food! that could easily be on short supply in one day, it's not that hard to accomplish this "feat"
The guitar center Memphis had a Zack wylde signature Les Paul fall off the wall and headstock got damaged. They glued the headstock and lowered the price way down. Guitar played great. My friend almost got it but his dad bought him an SG instead.
As a capitalist, I'm sure you know that the best course of action would be to fix that Les Paul to the best of your ability, sell it back to them, and just rinse & repeat when it lands back in the dumpster again.
I went to the same guitar center dumpster months ago just to see if i could find anything. The night i went, i pop open the lid to the dumpster and find myself an ovation acoustic guitar. Still had strings on it. The head stock had a chunk missing from it, fretboard has some issues and the body has slight cracking, but still plays really well for coming out of a dumpster.
Yes! Same here, subscribed and shared your video on my FB, since I've got a bunch of friends who are musicians and agree with your phylosophy regarding capitalism and my view on sustainable, circular economy
I once took back a gibson les paul studio and used my warranty to get a sg (they couldnt get me another lp studio hp for what i paid for it) and when i came for my case i found a tuner, kind of suspect since the guy said he loved that guitar and i should change the tuners
I knew a guy, that worked at a music store in Chicago suburb ( Joliet,il ) and he put the headstock back on my 58 les paul jr and all you could see was a hairline crack and he saved my guitar when i was 16 for $100 bucks, he also was the only fender authorised repairman for miles !! he played in a band with my dad in the 50's and 60's what a waiste of a gold top !!! his name was Charlie Brewer !! R.I.P
I used to work at gc in cherry hill nj. they are animals. they even take the guitar cord and strap out of brand new guitars so you can sell the customer they will need one. even custom shop guitars. bad news that place. stay away everybody.
scole901 Yes, buyer beware at GC. You gotta know what you're buying. If sez it comes with something, hold em to it. I bought a used Epi Casino and the web said it came with a case. It arrived at my GC in NJ all the way from Cali with out it. I showed them a screen shot where it said comes with case and demanded it. After the bs from GC employees on both coasts not doing their job. I finally got an Epi case.
I feel for you. I at times will buy used items in a thrift store, because I see value in them, and if I don't buy them, they will either be handled to much in the store, and parts begin to disappear, or trashed I feel. What bugs me is when they put the price label on a screen of a TV or computer screen. I now know of ways to get them off without destroying the screen most of the time, but before that I'd always have a mark or defect at that spot. Years back I worked at Radio Shack and we had a problem with customers buying something, and then saying it had a problem and we would find a problem and it would get trashed in the dumpster. In a day or so the same customer would be in the store with that item that was exchanged, claiming it had the same problem and they would get another replacement. Eventually we found out that they were taking that same item out of the dumpster and bringing it back as if it was the one they bought. From that point on we were told to destroy anything that might be usable before putting it in the trash dumpster. It this case they were radio controlled cars. The manager marked one at a unique spot and put it out there and then when it came around from that customer, he knew it was from our dumpster. This is one reason why they destroy stuff before putting it in the dumpster. But darn-it if it is a minor repair, fix it and sell it for at least the time and parts you put in it, if the repair customer does not want to pay for the repair, or else post it on E-bay or Craigs list as is. PS: people everywhere need to learn how to fix things again as well.
FOLLOW UP VIDEO: ruclips.net/video/sh_sqTxtCkI/видео.html
The Guitologist man if nothing else get a hold of the main people at guitar center and see if you could fix the stuff instead of doing that shit and let you donate it to underprivileged kids that are trying to learn maybe you and them could start a new program I would love to do it for the chattanooga area where I live
What a great story!
Just subbed after seeing this! Thanks! I went to Gibson's channel and guitar center and gave them a piece of my mind.... And I will occasionally do so, PATHETIC....
is why ya should only use mom pop shops
I’ve always been a fan of Guitar Center, and I’m not sure this might just be a local store issue. But, this really disappoints me with the GC brand! Wow! I’m with you Brad! They had so many better options, potentially, than destroying these instruments, just to keep someone, anyone, a kid who’s parents can’t afford to buy them a decent musical instrument, from using it! Greedy mofo’s! To put profit on new instrument sales ahead of charity is a really crappy mindset! No one expects GC to lose money, but, making one underprivileged child’s dream a reality would not harm their company. In fact, the PR alone might actually get them some free advertising and make people want to shop there! Pathetic and sad! Thanks Brad for bringing this issue to light! Rock on!
The gas cap on my 2016 Ford F-250 had a scratch on it, I did what any reasonable person would do and drove the truck into a canal.
Paddy is padding his resume for a job at the Ford dealership.
my truck needed new brakes . so I took some c4 to it and fixed the problem.
Paddy O'Lantern I
well done! you have learned well, grasshopper.
sounds like something haggard garage would do
That's not damaged, it's the Willie Nelson model.
Johnny Wayne TRIGGERed
Lol
I just died laughing at that :D
stan broniszewski - Paul Stanley had a supply or purpose made Gibson Mauraders that were specially made to break up when he smashed them. There were boxes of them wherever they toured.
One difference and it is a HUGE difference, Willie spent
years digging his own hole, they used a hammer.
I heard that they don't use a hammer. They take the employee who has made the fewest sales that week and just bash the instruments over his/her head before throwing them in the dumpster. Then they throw the instruments in the dumpster too.
That’s so brutal
It is like their dental plan, ask the boss for a raise and he knocks your teeth out.
That's just disgusting, how could you supposedly be a musician, or at least work at a music store, and have the stomach to destroy and discard instruments like that. I wouldn't be able to take a hammer to a instrument like that.
wiiqwertyuiop and Kowler right taking a hammer to a les Paul is a rediculous
In England, during the 90's and early 2000's shops would put bleach on food in skips (dumpsters) that was still in date. Also clothes and shoes were slashed with blades. Nowadays, some of the food goes to food banks as so many people rely on them due to low wages and austerity.
wiiqwertyuiop and Kowler That's nothing. I read that Gibson stacks hundreds of guitar which might have minor - cosmetic - damage and have the fork lift drive over them all. This is a daily occurence.
Burlats de Montaigne that sucks
Yeah ghostshadow, I would be surprised if no one is doing that, probably what I'd do, at least once in awhile.
This really hurts to be honest.... So many people out there are not able to afford even a no name guitar no matter how much they wish to play a guitar... and yet guitar center destroys a true Gibson Les Paul just because of... reasons... wow. people are wasteful. They have always been. I'll be really interested in your restoring process! Make something unique of it, something really beautiful! \m/
Do not FRET, he will use it for a good purpose!
Very true, btw I love your guitar videos😆
JJ's One Girl Band more than people, it's big companies like guitar center that are so wasteful. Who cares if they loose money, that less Paul could've made someone so happy, the guy in the video even has proof it had no damage before it was destroyed.
Gibson told them to though
whats the actual reason behind this? i really dont get it.
It's such a shame they destroy these instruments instead of selling them at reduced prices it's such a ridiculous practice. All the workmanship that goes into these and they take hammers to them. I appreciate what you do. Shame on guitar center and the other companies that allow this.
They would break seconds if they didn't know better.
I hope Brad can find and fix stuff to fund his channel.
It's a fact of life in retail. If something comes in damaged, the retailer wants credit for it from the wholesaler/distributer/manufacturer. The deal is to destroy it and get credit. If the retailer keeps it and resells it as damaged, he doesn't get the credit.
They do this with unsold books & magazines and nearly anything that is damaged including appliances, musical instruments, toy, clothing, and so on and so forth.
what a waste to do that. give them to a local school to use or to a music project to get people into music. taking a hammer to it, just pointless.
Dusty Korpse or sell them for less money!!!
I can't afford a really good guitar
Go on eBay and track down a olp mm1...going anywhere from 75.00...to 250.00....was a licensed Ernie Ball Music Man Axis Clone....had bad ass stick pickups and a great neck!...best guitar I've played for the money!...still own three....sold one...love em
Stock instead of "Stick".. Lol
It's all about greed. They don't care about helping anybody. If they can't get they money they want, they would rather see it trashed than to see someone get use out of it. I worked at a Kmart when I was young, and they would NEVER give employees broken merchandise and would fire you if they caught you taking something from the dumpster that they threw away. Sad.
It's better to waste 1, then having people scratch 100 so that they lower the price by half.
Sometimes things that don't make sense are done, because alternatives don't work.
I just went this past weekend to guitar center in Lexington ky to buy a martin and they were the rudest ppl I've dealt with ever. So found little guitar store cpl miles away called Willcutt guitars and man I got the most beautiful sounding martin I've ever heard. The old man who sold it to me was amazing. So I will never enter another guitar center ever again. Specially after watching this.
Chris Bocook the one near Fayette mall? I’ve never had any rude workers there
Willcut is where it is at! They are an awesome local shop.
The smaller shops tend to be more friendly and more insightful when someone comes into their shop. They don't get as many customers, so they tend to care about appeasing everyone who comes in.
Dude I have two local guitar stores, one is a Gibson, fender, Taylor exclusive custom shop dealer, lil up tight, but the other has all sorts of gear with super down to earth employees, it’s the small shops that are the greatest
It’s called ksm, they’re a pretty cool store
I said it before when this first started. The first rule about GC dumpster diving is: we don't talk about GC dumpster diving.
John Brady yep they see this. They are going to lock those dumpsters up.
Dudes!... I live in Australia, so it's no thing to me either way, but maaan, Guitarologist screwed everyone cottoned onto dumpster-diving over good n proper. I'd be pissed, if I were one of you!
Yeah, no shit!
I have dumpster dived at GC a few times. The first time was following the advice of one of the sales guys there. Someone said that they had old school Peavey bulletcases for sale. When I went there they were gone. Sales guy told me to look in the dumpster. And sure enough there was one. Scratched but I used it to ship an 80s Peavey I sold on TB.
Preach!!!
I got 2 Taylor guitars in a dumpster behind a guitar center year's ago. My friend worked there and told me they were there if I wanted them. I took them to a luthier and he told me he would fix one free of charge if I gave him the nicest one. I said sure and I'm still playing it 10 years later.
lol
Sounds like a lot of work for a broken second hand Taylor
@@Iheartdgd Really? Wow.
@@Iheartdgd says the millionaire
Not really for free he took the better of the two
dude, that's like crushing a car just because it has a flat tire.
Kyle M. That would be the dumbest reason why to destroy a car
exactly my point.
Nope. That's like crushing a car because you have one too many.
Like when Patrick gave his car to the junkyard when the gas tank to e
Nope. Crushing a guitar because it is in perfect working condition, but is last year's edition.
You won't believe what I found in Guitar Center today. A tuned guitar!
I must have been in there right ahead of you.
Where in the hell was that one ...in the glass display case... It must have been meant for Sam Ash thats the only store i find those weird guitars... Actually in tune wtf
Were they rusty?
Waste. Seriously. If you are capitalist then you know our money is based on product and free enterprise. It takes product and tangible substance to back dollars, like precious metals, natural resources and land. The economy has turned into a free for all in recent years, abandoning the sensible ways of the past to follow rumors, greed, and feelings.
It is sad they will be able to write this off for when you ponder the realness of what is being done in reality is fraud but yet protected by red tape bureaucratic loopholes for tax write offs. Flat tax would keep things like this from happening.
Best of luck with the Gibson restoration
I'm a retired guy that works at Guitar Center and you are full of shit. We do not toss scrached guitars. We send back to manufacture. Don't know what you found but it's not standard practice at all...trust me. Since GC doesn't have staff to do headstock repairs Gibson most likley asked to discard guitar taht was damaged in shipping you dumbass. GC lets all players come in and play guitars that no other music store on the planet would allow.. Be happy you found a guitar and stop trashing GC as you are clueless.
We live in a throw away society and its sad because I enjoy fixing things I just fixed my neighbors 700 expresso machine and it feels good to accomplish something like that I have repaired cars and trucks at ford dealers for the last 27 years and love watching you fix stuff so keep up the good work
The feeling you describe is something all men are supposed to feel.
Agreed. I just recently started doing repairs in Brooklyn and you wouldnt believe the things ive seen thrown to the curb here. Mostly surround sound stuff from people moving and what not, but yeah, Throw Away Society in full effect. Thanks for posting this. I've been checking out your vids for a while, and this one had me pretty triggered. Keep it up man, you might open the right persons eyes ;)
yes fixing stuff is the best feeling. or re purposing old stuff. Corporate greed and waste go hand in hand unfortunately. you would not believe the amount of usable good food that is thrown away at restaurants (where I work) as well.
One thing I think would make a really cool design on the back of the destroyed neck would be to glue it back together and then go to the craft store and get some fake Gold Leaf to apply to the cracks for a Kintsugi effect on the back of the neck. Kintsugi is the Japanese art form in which breaks and repairs are treated as part of the object's history, and that would only add to the fact that this guitar was literally thrown away and you brought it back and made it even more beautiful.
Lol you were totally going through the trash.
.. Good on you
I love this idea!
I remember, way back when, how there were certain kids who, during lunch hour at school wouldn't eat certain things. However, if someone asked them for it they'd say no, and throw it away! I always wondered at what was going on in their head. Some folks are just crippled inside. This video reminds me of those kids. They must have grown up to become music store owners/managers, eh?
Sadly the manufacturers/distributors usually tell the retailers that they must do this, or they will be sued. It's in a legal contract. I work in the IT industry, similar happens on extremely high end gear. Even the IT garbage processing people are under contract to not let anyone take certain branded equipment from their garbage storage or they will be sued too. It's crazy. Cheaper to throw away and 'protect the brand' as they say. But such extreme waste when there are very worthy places who would love such equipment.
People are selfish and greedy. If they can't have it or can't use it then neither can you. That's the attitude they got.
@@heathenwarrior2522 Unfortunately, so true!
Please PLEASE rebuild it, you'll win the internet! A HERO FOR THE MASSES :)
...exactly Six Million Dollar Man style: "we can rebuild him!"
Why? It's just a plank with a name on it! I say it's a waste of time and money.
Get yourself a nice used Korean Cort M600 for $/€200-250 and you'll have a much nicer guitar.
ruclips.net/video/ndxWJPB1UJY/видео.html
Although your point is valid in a general context, in this context I think flipping the bird to these tools is a brilliant idea :)
I'd love to see the process of putting that Les Paul back to a playable guitar.
If you wanna see that crappy Goldtop "restored" go to the Nashville factory.
This guy sees a pile of sawdust: "This is fixable"
Making that Gibson playable just so you could take it with you back to that Guitar Center ostensibly to try some of their amps would be a hilarious video.
Oh man, you're evil minded. :P
Please do it,Im practically shaking with rage after watching what they are doing :/
This this this!!! :)
Don't do a good job, just fill, sand, and rewire on the body. Glue the neck and sand it, don't refinish it. In other words, make it playable, but, leave the damage somewhat still visible so they can tell it's the one they junked.
There's this Guitar Summit thing you really ought to speak on this to bring awareness there's a few Guitar Guys that Mod Guitars Homegrown Luthiers that would do the fixes for free to give away to others..I left another comment toward the end I have a few ideas that would help you get this out their you nailed it. If folks all over took pics of the stuff GC is trashing there could be a WALL of SHAME for G.C. get a couple of bigger names on board this could go vial & cause a change "The Food Babe" has done some great work like getting Subway to stop putting Foam in the bread & beaver butt in her husbands fav Beer. You did a great job w/this. But a mini documentary I believe would be a far greater tool to show the Rot as you so righty put it. Please read the other post .
I worked for 25yrs in auto dealerships, did the same thing worst travesty I ever seen was cash for clunkers. We destroyed thousands of cars & trucks that were perfectly fine. Your a good dude & can see the way things are done in this pagan society. Peace & Pray for Fla.
Cash for clunkers was actually APPLAUDED by environmentalists! They are some of the dumbest fucking people around sometimes. Huge waste of resources and energy that actually HURT struggling families who could have used the economic benefits of having those transportation options available in the market. Yeah, you get it.
"[The] benefits of having [those cars] on the market" - exactly. "Cash for Clunkers" drove up the average price of a used car tremendously. And who has multiple thousands of dollars laying about ready to buy a replacement car should something catastrophic happen? It also turned out to be a nice pay-day for banks and other corporations that made auto loans, not to mention the payday for Detroit/Tokyo/Seoul.
That's bizarre, because it strikes me as being rather anti-environmental if the cars were just thrown away rather than parted out and used to repair other cars, or at least the materials recycled. That's hugely wasteful. If they were worried about the pollution issues of older cars, they could have sent them to a shop to gut them and convert them to custom electric cars (there are several shops that do this). However, of course these custom electric cars built from old chassis / bodies have issues with passing safety tests, and also legal issues around driving them on the road, partly because of the custom nature of the conversion. There should be a way to standardize or streamline this process, have good safety / inspection tests set up, and legislate so those "new" old cars can go back on the road, driveable with their new paperwork.
Andrew Barrett ah, but no-one pays the environmental costs.
I remember that too.. we where told too drain the oil out of the engines and then just let then run till they seized up lol
Corporate greed, profit before people, wonderful symptoms of our rapidly growing disposable society. Good of you to expose this type of crime. Keep up the good work!
I'd give anything for a Gold Top Lester, and yet here we are, a perfectly good one smashed to pieces and tossed in a dumpster. I hope you manage to save it. I'm just going to go hug my Epiphone in the other room...
If you’d give anything, I hear they trade em for money
I love my Norlin Deluxe Goldtop. Only a Goldtop is good enough.
I'll bet half the project guitars on Ebay were acquired thusly. I was buddy buddy with a guitar store owner in my youth and shipping insurance would pay for broken stuff then the store destroys beyond repair and he had to send a picture, back in the days of 14400 kbs dial up and scanning a polaroid or faxing it. the resolution was so bad on either you could send a pic of a random busted axe then have a project. Those guitars were fixed and used by youth groups at his church, 7 maybe 8 in total the whole time I knew him. It was always the indonesian or korean stuff that had shipping problems so they weren't gibsons by any stretch, but the were shiny and played nicely after he got done with them. Like you, he could not fathom such waste.
yes and i bet most of the cheap chinese guitar and electronic parts on ebay are stolen from the manufacture plant in china and passed out the back door. Black market parts are a huge business.
Is recycling actually black market? Dont think so, most of the aitcraft in the US fly using recycled parts
If you are refeering to Green323turbo, stealing things from a manufacturing plant that where meant to be sold is no recycling. that is stealing.
There's a thing though, where discarded boards and electronics components that don't meet spec end up being picked up from dumpsters and sold as new and genuine. They don't usually end up at major distributors, but occasionally that happens too, and they do end up in Huaqiangbei and from there on Ali and eBay. That however is not typical. A huge number are straight up fakes, where a different, functionally vaguely similar silicon ends up being repackaged and remarked, and China of course has its own manufacturers. Genuine items often end up in Huaqiangbei too because PCB manufacturing plants secure very good prices with component manufacturers by buying in millions, and end up dumping tens thousands of items of overstock at the end of production. In part, Western manufacturers such as STM have to offer much lower prices in China than to Western distributors for some of their catalogue to rival Chinese parts. Plus there's always the pick and place reject bin where the machine dumps ICs that couldn't be picked up automatically or fell off the vacuum picker - that's a fraction of a percent, but these bins end up being sold off and salvaged, though salvaging is not always performed in ESD-safe manner and you can end up with ICs that are genuine and work initially but fail quickly. Whether you are likely to get a fake, an overstock item, or a pick and place salvage, depends on the specific IC or component.
I don't know about guitar parts, i think they're just cheap generic items with correspondingly none to minimal quality control, nothing stolen anywhere - after all it doesn't exactly cost millions to set up production of a cast or machined piece of metal or plastic, as opposed to ICs.
Fully fuctionional parts and completed product gets passed out the back door or thru dumpster and sold online all the time in china and other countries where big manufacturing plants are set up. Im not talking about defective or junk.
I’m just now seeing this video, it saddens me that this stuff happens. I’m disabled living on a very tight fixed income. I’m having an extremely hard time getting myself a Marshall head and cabinet that I’ve wanted since I was 18. If I saw that kind of stuff in my Dayton Guitar Center dumpster I’d take it and fix it myself. I can’t see things like that go to waste.
I'm in the same boat disable and fixed.but love guitars. At least we can dream I'd love a goldtop so much...have a good new year buddy
After we build a machine (CNC machine tools) for a customer, all the material associated with that project cannot be used on another machine because of accounting/tax/capital laws. We throw unopened boxes of bolts, screws, channel, conduit etc in the scrap hopper. We then sell that to the scrapper for pennies on the dollar. It makes me sick. I throw away a box of 1000 bolts, then for the new project I open a box of the *EXACT* same thing. The only difference is that the boxes have a different job number, and that is all. We have all brought it up to the company execs and they tell us there's nothing they can do. If we are caught using material that we have written off as capital expenditures, then we are in deep doo doo. It's not the company, it's the law.
Dumbass bureaucrats in government strike again. Bunch of dipshits with nothing good to do but justify their useless positions. Making rules that create waste and reward cronies is all they know how to do.
Exactly what it is.
Agorism, ftw. I see what you are doing here as guitar Agorism :). Agora, anarchy, action my friend.
Sounds like you guys need to do a better job at determining how many bolts you need for each project. Your company is the one creating the waste, not the government (not that I'm defending the stupidity of government). I'm sure they sell bolts in boxes of less than 1000.
You have no idea how this business is ran. A job order has hundreds of options available. When the order is placed, the purchasing people have ordered exactly what is needed. As the customer develops his product, the components change with what we call a POC (purchase order change) and things are added or deleted. When the product is shipped, there are partial boxes of shit everywhere. That's what I meant when I say we throw them out. If the box of 1000 has 800 used, the remainder of that box is pitched. By law that material cannot be capitalized twice (or some kind or tax code thing). If its an unopened/unused it can be returned to the supplier and adjusted. And material that is in our inventory at the end of the fiscal year is taxable, so it makes no sense keeping it. There is much more than that, but that is just the basics and I am tired of typing
Stamp the headstock and body with a blem mark so it doesn't go out into the wild as being what it isn't.
Guitars for Vets, kids learning guitar, lots of other places these could go.
Good point!
I used to work in the camera dept. of a chain store in the 70's. They had a beautiful telephoto lens that retailed for 350.00. The focus ring didn't work correctly. They got permission to destroy it or sell to an employee for 7.00. I was the lucky employee who purchased it, took it home, tightened 3 set screws and it worked perfectly. Later I worked in a toy warehouse that serviced Toys R Us and dozens of other retailers. When GI Joe lost a shoe or Barbies Kitchen was missing a piece they were told to destroy them. I got permission to take them and donate them to Churches, the Salvation Army, Hospitals and my neighbor who was a State Trooper. After that no one could complain about my parties, he was on my side...
Be a hero and fix this Les Paul. No need to remove the hammer marks. They belong to this guitar's history now.
I agree. Show off those battle scars to bring attention to this sickening practice.
Mathead it's about to be a relic gibson
@@donovanolguin977 Again, Fender charges $2K extra to do it.
It just breaks my heart to see a guitar like this in this condition
Play authentic
Why waste your time on junk? I stumbled on this video and can't get what the big deal is over stuff that belongs in the dumpster. One's man trash could very well belong in the trash. I'm a recycling guy. I like to make old like new. But give it up sometimes. Junk is junk. Let it go!!
Carl Bonham Did you reply to the wrong comment? I just don’t like seeing any guitar beat up like this. I didn’t say it was worth salvaging or anything like that but seeing a guitar purposely beat up sucks to look at.
What is up with this? Some people who can't afford a guitar can go do some dumpster diving and with a little effort, come up with a guitar they can play and cherish.
Then along comes some guy who thinks it's a good idea to ruin it for everybody else by blowing it up on youtube.... Why do you think this should be done? What purpose does it serve? Maybe it gives you an inflated feeling of self importance or something.
Now who gets a shot at finding a gem in a dumpster? Thanks Genius....
I know this is an older video. A personal story of mine.
I knew a lady who's daughter wanted to learn guitar. I took an old,dented,pegs missing,broken tuning keys,sanded and painted with purple with acrylic paint,acoustic guitar, I had bought for like $20. I totally repaired,and refinished it,then gave it to her,no charge whatsoever.
The point is,I wanted the daughter to learn on something decent. And being a mother of low income,to have a happy child.
I believe in your cause,and wish you the best of luck.
I worked for GC like seven years ago and if a guitar was broken we just got our local luthier to fix it, and then we would just blow it out for cheap. If it came broken from the DC we'd usually just put it back in a box and send it back on the next returns pallet. I can't even imagine my store manager or district manager being willing to throw out a guitar with a broken headstock. Although the hammer hits on the body are troubling.
I'm curious what's going on with GC now ... it wasn't a terrible place to work (my store at least) back in the day.
Wild stuff. I worked at a Landfill about 4 years. Anything from 40 yard closed top dumpsters full of new clothing from J C Pennys, to 30 & 40 yard dumpsters full, full of Ford Diesel Fuel Injector Pumps due to a design change to Radios with CD players were dumped because they would get a few bad radios per pallet of 1,000. It was cheaper to toss everything away & take a $20,000 tax right off than to pay to test each one. The stuff that was sold out of the Landfill was crazy. When I was in demolition, we were stripping out the Ford Tractor Pant in Romeo Michigan & the plant manager told us that he had already told the guards that the employee's were allowed to take anything they wanted, as long as it was carried out of the plant. The first thing I grabbed was a Cushman Cart- 3 wheeler out on a forklift & took it out to my truck. Also got about 50 Injector Pumps, New Radio's & Starters. This was a very wild time for us....
Great salvage story!
Daniel Jenn - how did you get the Cushman Cart off your truck, a ramp? And what did you do with it?
One of the other operators took one of the other forklifts out & took it. I did have a couple of catwalk 12" W x 8' L pieces cut off with a torch by a labor & took them out with the cart. The operator who ended up taking them has all kinds of ramp material because he owned a small trailer that held a JD dozer he used to do gravel drives & lot grading on the side. How could I be pissed, when every opened parts pallet & all the 20 yard open top dumpsters were filled with Ford Tractor parts. Remember when I said the plant manager cleared with the Ford security guards about us taking stuff from the plant? Well there were dozens of dumpsters & hundreds of pallets & part gondolas, with only a few missing parts, so it was considered trash, [only full plastic wrapped parts pallets were shipped to other plants. It was the largest legal score we had in the demo business.] [When I worked at the old Dodge Main Chrysler Plant in Detroit, which after all the demo, the new Caddilac assembly plant was built on the property], at any rate at Dodge main which had 6 or 7-8 story buildings, we were driving our pickup's in the large freight elevators, floor by floor loading up on snap-on tool boxes, full of snap-on tools. Both hand & small power tools. Job's like those two only came up like 4-5 times in my 30 years as an operating engineer. Wild times. As for the Dodge Main job, my salvage paid for a 2 bedroom. 1 bath & storage/utility room addition to our home. I think back then it cost us like $10,000, which was a lot back in 1980-81. Probably a $30,000 gig today. I can still remember the contractor's salesman asking if we wanted them or if we already had a bank setup to finance the addition, my wife at the time said, " No, my husband has cash." I was like please don't say that stuff. It's more regulated today.
I would love to be on a trash Truck in Houston or parts of Florida right now, all types of things that can be reused, repaired, cleaned up. A friends storage building flooded, & tons of Amps, Mesa Boogie Cab, tons of music memorabilia. My friend said it's poop water & left, after more thought he went back to get the cabs, he can replace the speakers, I put some thoughts in his head about saving what he could. Hate that.
I worked in Orlando Florida tearing down the electrical power plant & when the company stopped giving us perdium [I think I spelled it right] & paying our union benefits, we started picking up all the brass & copper that we could find which power plants have tons of & we had to hold our drivers license up while they took our pictures & that was back in 1991 or 92 after a hurricane that hit that state. Now it's hard to get stuff without someone watching or asking where you got the stuff from. Here in Michigan, you take your scrap in & have a 3-day wait period till your money is ready or you get a post dated check. When copper hit $3.90 per pound, that's when everything changed because in Detroit, they were cutting hot lines from electrical poles & taking the feeds to plants, which at the time that 1 1/2" 15' 3-line drops was worth a couple hundred bucks. It was sorta funny driving up to our job & all the shops in the area had no lights on. Pretty ballzy if you ask me.
The kids who would love to have this damaged equipment might come back when they’re grown and buy better stuff. Shortsighted of GC.
If I'm a Master Builder at Gibson Memphis putting the utmost pride in my work and building everything to perfection. Then I find out perfectly good guitars are being destroyed per corporate policy over inventory issues?? Yeah, I'm not going to take that much pride in my work any more.
That guy should be saying, no. If my work is going to guitar center just to be destroyed them fuck that, I'm not building guitars for Gibson anymore.
your first mistake is thinking Gibson has working master builders for production guitars,machines are the "builders" now,dont believe the hype,all Gibson Guitars are production reguardless what title its given,Historic,Custom ...etc,you want to believe the numbers are low,specially if you own one,reality is thousands are produced per day,corporate greed sets the value,certainly not quality and we the consumer are pawns.I own and play a LP traditional and I love it,problem is,Ive had at least 5 LPs that were absolute garbage,I had a new Custom with a twisted neck,Ive witnessed a standard with a nut cut so deep it almost was touching the first fret and more than one frets lifted,both likely left the factory like that.We are talking 3-4000 dollar guitars here,for a reseller to be told to destroy a guitar rather than repair, makes perfect sense if your into the product for less than what it costs to ship it back to be fixed
Dick L that sux for you. I own 5 different Gibson's and all are outstanding. Purchased three from GC, two from individuals.
I took the time to play them in different tuning. Looked them over for obvious problems and made my purchases only when a guitar filled my need.
My favorite Gibson happens to be my 2003 studio Les Paul and my 88 SG.
Never buy a musical instrument without checking it out personally. You will be a much happier musician when you enjoy what you play on.
Haha master builder ! no such thing at Gibson. They are built by normal factory workers. If they weren't making guitars they could be putting cakes in boxes or screwing together car parts. The skilled luthiers line is something they bullshit with to justify the prices. 70% of a les paul is made by CNC robots
there is no master builder building a regular les paul. sorry master builders do not build those. master builders build custom shop only
Any and all REAL musicians should be appalled by this practice. Guitar Center shame on you. Ever heard of scratch and dent sales? What a waste.
To think that most schools cannot afford music equipment, & here's this shitbag of a company not only throwing everything away, but taking the time out of their business day to really smash everything up until it's not useable or recoverable at all. Absolutely fucking gross business practices.
GUITAR CENTER SUCKS, BUY USED AND GOOD SETUP GUITAR GUY.
I used to work at Walmart and the reason for smashing things was to keep dumpster divers from bringing defective items back into the store and trying to get a cash refund. I've seen people even try to get a refund on dead plants they fished out of the dumpster.
Sweet! No hammer ons played on the fretboard!!
Lead by example Brad. Fix the guitar and donate it. That would be awesome.
That would be awesome, what happened to this Les Paul?
All of that stuff is totally repairable, The headstock of my Martin D 18 was snapped off, A good luthier put it back on- he set dowels into the wood, so it stays in tune. Even if the neck is too trashed to fix, you can replace it. The keyboard might be repairable if you have all of the plastic parts, or you could replace some of the broken plastic. That Luna guitar was a really nice guitar
My favorite independent music store has a great guitar tech and he repaired the headstock on a Les Paul Raw Power, which I bought at a good discount. No need to trash 'em, repair 'em.
Brad, you should start a nonprofit to distribute these instruments to the needy. GC gets a receipt for declared value from you when they donate, and you get first crack at everything they otherwise would have destroyed. Would make for some great video footage too...get to see gear go from broken, to fixed, to the hands of happy kids.
That would honestly be my dream job.
I'm an amateur luthier and only work on my own guitars and friends for free. I've fixed an SG that had the body split right in half. The neck joint had a fairly clean break. I found it in the mid 1990's in a Sam Ash dumpster. With some glue, wood filler, and an opaque black paint job, it looked and played great. Gifted it to a friend who still owns it.
if that Gibson was in perfect shape beforehand, then that manager needs his ass kicked! if it had been me, i would have taken it home
How can they do this shit. Makes no sense.
Brian Marcou LAZINESS! Thats how.
Brian Marcou if they let "damaged" guitars get picked out of their dumpster and repaired that's one less guitar they could potentially sell.
Capitalism and the bottom line, that's how. Moral Capitalists, there's a good way to be a douche but still feel good about yourself.
If it doesn't make cents, look for the dollars! Now you know why Gibsons are so expensive.
The manufacturing costs of all this equipment is really not substantial.
But the potential profit loss from threatening a few sales actually IS.
It's far better for the Bottom Line to wreck functioning gear than let people grab it and avoid paying their money.
I spoke to a guitar center employee after a really bad flood we had in my home town, and they had some damaged guitars... He told me that their guitars are insured, but in order to get their money for damaged guitars the insurance company requires that they destroy them... He said that he hates to do it, but they kinda have no choice...I'm not sure about how they handle "inventory issues", but that's what I've heard from an employee...
That's shameful. Nowhere near as bad, a couple of months ago I pulled a Yamaha Pacifica and a Washburn Idol out of skip (UK term for dumpster) at my local recycling centre. Nothing much wrong with either guitar and had the previous owner listed them on Gumtree for a small fee they'd have sold pretty quickly.....probably to me :)
d2vmusic there are other English people here that don't need that explaining mate lol ;p
Haha! Yeah, but just for the benefit of those that don't speak the Queen's ;)
They probably "waste" it because they cant sell it then claim on the insurance
This is a call made from the insurance company, Assurion, that deals with their pro coverage claims. These items are like "totalled cars" and are fully cost covered to the purchaser. If it's a customer that is... if it's store inventory then they are just getting screwed on the cost. Its why you see the hardware and pickups salvaged. Whether its store shrink or pro coverage, parts are salvaged because either way its "company inventory" and they can use parts for the repairs department.
I cried a little!
Great video, terrible waste by these companies. I know for a fact that school music departments up and down this country and other country's would benefit greatly from these 'used' instruments. My brother is a school teacher in the U.K.
companies giving things away?! thats socialism, you can't have that!
Socialism my arse. Done right it is philanthropy, and whadya know, it also makes sound, promotional sense. Headline: Guitar Center helps needy kids!
I suspect you are being sarcastic. But your comment is a good example of the American business mindset since the introduction of Reaganomics.
My Dad used to pick up old inexpensive damaged guitars and violins and fix them up to place in the hands of a young person who wanted to learn to play, but otherwise couldn't afford an instrument. He mentored kids like this and it was one of his favorite things to do. When he passed away, he left behind about a dozen old guitars in various states of disrepair. I don't have the luthier skills he did, so I found a local luthier who restored them to at least playing order. About half went to kids due to their size, i.e. beginner's or parlor guitars and the rest went to a local VA hospital, where they loan them out to Vets sort of like library books.
You are point on about this sort of waste and all that could have gone to a worthy home.
I'm sure someone has said something like this in the comments before but to me this is a reflection of how our modern messed up society is. They don;t even understand the value of what a musical instrument is. They think it's about money. That's really messed up. This is what's wrong with the music industry of today as well. They think it's about money. Music and the instruments that are art in and of themselves is about reaching for things higher and deeper than ourselves. All the way from the creation of the instrument to the mesmerizing state a musician reaches (at certain very special moments) while playing it. Even if it's an assembly line cheapy. It still has a quality of being something to be respected and valued for what it is and does. These instruments were so very valuable even if sold as seconds but these "Rats" that contend "they are worth more destroyed to the Company than sold for less as seconds" are really sick in the soul. I'm sure this is done by "Higher ups" in the chain that do what they do for all the wrong reasons. They are not just wrong they are criminal.
It all has to do with tax accounting. It's not demonic or wrong or evil. If you think it's as bad as you wrote then do something about it. Get your state senator to change the state or federal tax codes to make it more beneficial to donate damaged instruments then to destroy them.
Un F**king believable! Just one more reason why I detest Guitar Center and chains like that!
Hey, if you haven't started on the LP or the Luna, there's a super glue based product that does WONDERS when it comes to guitar repairs, it's called GluBoost. Allparts sells it, and StewMac might have it as well. Just look around youtube for tons of videos showing how it can be used in guitar repairs. I repaired an Alvarez with a broken headstock for a customer, he thought it was ruined. It wasn't a valuable guitar, but it had come from a member of his family who is no longer with us. I was able to repair the front side of the headstock so well that he couldn't actually tell it had been broken until I showed him that it is in fact the same headstock. He thought at first glance that I'd replaced the entire neck. Guy was so happy he wept.
I'm actually depressed after watching this. The guitars I've got are all home - made out of bits off've other guitars and to see the state of that Goldtop is actually distressing.
While my Goldtop gently weeps.
Gibson: Rosewood is becoming hard to find.
Gibson to GC: inventory problem with the goldtop, just take a hammer to it.
Rosewood is NOT hard to find. It just takes a lot of paperwork and extra cost to get any rosewood over the border, in either direction: IN or OUT.
So if the guitar is ready, you need storage room for quite a long time until the paperwork from BOTH governments (exporting country AND importing country) is ready.
The best solution is to used alternative woods like pau ferro. That's what Fender did.
Ginger Beer something tells me something flew over your head. He was joking
Ginger Beer Except Pau Ferro looks like shit on production guitars
It goes back to Henry’s “no seconds” policy. He told all the workers they had to destroy anything with even minor damage.
5Rounds Rapid My uncle worked for Gibson for 25 years and he never told me that.
I believe the managers name is Pete Townsend.
It would have been a 70s Deluxe if that was the case.
Good thing it wasn't burnt.
@@alwaysopen7970 If it was a strat it would have been the other manager James.
Those guys sound like a bunch a greedy motherfu****s. Continue to be a rebel. Love your vids man.
Thanks, Samuel.
Dude, when I was 14, I would have killed to have a Les Paul Goldtop, hell that'd still be a big deal to me. I was a poor kid living in a dump of a city, and music was the only thing I had to keep me going. I can't believe Guitar Center cares so little about these instruments that somebody would have cherished.
What'n tarnation... True... the capitalism is ruined... the left politic side has become socialism basically.
Guitar Center and all of their subsidiaries like Music and Arts deserve none of our business. I, personally, will not shop at either and I will be sure to dissuade anyone from shopping there. Shop local, folks, or deal with a reputable online retailer like Wildwood or Sweetwater.
Well said my friend. Shop local yes you may pay more but to me it's well worth it. When I go in my local music shop I'm always greeted warmly treated well and the staff is actually knowledgeable about what they are selling.
Guitar Center was purchased by Mitt Romney's business firm, Bain Capital which is tied to all sorts of other big companies like Burger King, Staples, Dominos Pizza, The Weather Channel, Dunkin Donuts, Burlington Coat factory and many more. When it comes to guitars I only buy used now, I won't give these companies my business, haven't in years.
Thomann's pretty good. The things that have minimal damaged are sold at a discount (called B Stock)
I wouldnt stop into a guitar center to take a dump
geetarbube Dont they own Music 123 and Musicians Friend too?
Hey Brad,just wanted to tell ya ,I live in wpb Florida and I just went into the GC dumpster lol. Only thing decent in there was some stage speaker stands which I got by on stage stands and microphone stand with grip and a padded large combo amp sleeve. There was a small crap crate amp black model. But I left it.
I would have grabbed the Crate just to play around with.
Down with Guitar Center! I ordered a used 2008? gibson lp special w/case (squared edge 59 body with a 1960ish scratch plate). It was at another store so they sent it to one about 30 miles from me . I waited and waited for the phone call and after 2+ weeks go by I decide to call them. And after talking to 3 different people and on hold for 10 min someone picks up the phone and says "it's here" (me) Oh, when did it arrive? (GC) It looks like we've had it for about a week. (me) WTF, you don't call? When I looked at the guitar it was filthy. Some greasy mfer played this thing. The grime was just caked on, like somebody sprayed liquid garbage over the whole guitar and let it bake in the sun for a year or two. The case was after market and it didn't fit the special, it was for a regular les paul. The sales people didn't give a f%$# when I pointed these things out. I figured if it's a good guitar I can overlook these things and asked them if they'd throw in a set of strings. GC Says "If you want strings you have to buy them. The strings were so nasty I couldn't even test the guitar there. The Special had a factory TOM and a stoptail w/ strings top wrapped which created dents or grooves in the metal. GC says "the strings come top wrapped from the factory". I've never heard of that, but I'm an authority in the field. It took 6 hours to clean it and I discovered a vertical groove on the 13th or 14th fret and sure enough the g string fits perfectly in the groove. It looked like it was made with a nut file. How the hell would something like that happen? So, I brought the the guitar back and asked them to fix it or give me some sort of discount. They wouldn't do neither so, I returned it. Now they have a perfectly clean Gibson Les Paul Special with new strings (that I paid for, And they wouldn't refund me for the strings). All it needs is a new fret, I think a fret level to get below the groove would be a waste since the rest of the frets still had lots of life in them. I wonder what they did with that? Did they fix it? Did they hang it on the wall after I left (with the "maybe the next guy won't notice" attitude? Of course I could've easily had it fixed but it's not just the money it's the principal of the thing. Had these guys been cool with me (Sales 101) I would go there in the future to spend my $$$$. This isn't the only time I've had an issue with Guitar Center. Now I tell people go anywhere but there, it there's anywhere left. It's scumbags like this that put the mom and pops out of business. That being said FUCK Gibson too. Until they bring the prices back down to earth and and deliver a consistent and superb sounding/playing product.(which they claim to do anyways) Don't give them any new money. You can Still have yer Gibson just Buy used from owners not dealers.
Gibson have forsaken the little dealers long ago. They beat them up and beat them up to the point they could not reach their purchasing goals and were forced to stop carrying Gibson. Now, the only dealers large enough to carry them are the big boxes, and Gibson will share their fate, ultimately.
Good point. If you buy a Les Paul, you are buying technology of the 1950s anyway.
Ginger Beer And, that's a bad thing? Lol Every electric guitar is the tech of the 50s. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And, if it is broken, smash and toss. Lol
Ginger Beer most people would consider that a plus
That's exactly what I'm saying. They sell it as if they are valuable state of the art high-tech equipment. In fact they are selling us a MYTH.
Personally I wouldn't put too much energy and time in this piece of garbage. If you are planning to donate to the poor kids, donate something GOOD.
If you want to donate a car, would you donate one that's ready for the shredder? This guitar served as a parts donor, just like cars that are a total loss. I must say that a good luthier could have saved the gold painted body, but except for the truss rod that neck was GONE.
This guitar needed a new neck and all of the work of a reset. That's worth a lot of money. And that's why this guitar was declared a TOTAL LOSS.
It hurts to see that, but sometimes you need to LET THINGS GO.
I'm sorry if this wasn't your intention..but...
I'm brazilian and i'll try to visit the United States next year, spend as much time as possible
and one of my goals is search in dumpsters for instruments. like a scavenger haha
hope i find some good shit lol
You would be shocked at some of the shit we throw away here. Stick to dumpsters behind specialty stores for cool stuff.
Alexandre FontesTV typical Brazilian
cerg everyone thinks I'm crazy when I check trash cans for unopened candy and stuff.
BR?
Sim kkkk
This has been in my feed for a while but just got around to watching it today. Good info on what's going on at retailers and good approaches to your opinions on alternatives to destroying perfectly functioning goods. LOL Hope you didn't get the employee who talked to you in trouble, he was kinda put on blast. Seriously though, those goods were destroyed with conviction. You made someone mad.
Target in my area, used to fill a "huge" dumpster with returned bicycles each month. Then set it out in the parking lot to be picked up for landfill. Someone posted it on the local community website. They don't dump bikes anymore.
Or they just crush them in secret.
The Guitologist I imagine in the future all these places will have an incinerator in the basement where they can just burn all of their "inventory problems"...to really save money : GC could have their own trains like you see in the old movies with the conductor shoveling coal into the engine, only now they "go green" by shoveling in guitars instead of coal.
I am also a witness of this ! I built bikes for target for over a year and occasionally we would receive some in the mail that had torn boxes and when you got the bike out you can clearly see that the wheels are all bent and out of true from shipping. Luckily for my store I was able to tru the wheels pin straight and save my store from throwing out dozens of bikes like they have been doing all along.
Like the Marriott ferry that went to st thomas and ONLY rescued Marriott hotel guests!!!! Corporate has lost touch, a true shame... keep up the rants Brad!!
jimmy meyer that's different, since apparently the company was avoiding lawsuits by not taking the others.
If you ask me, they should have made them sign liability wavers or something.
jimmy meyer if it was me in charge, I would have told the staff to go check on our guests, then "accidentally" left the door open/ramp down/whatever.
If people climb onto the boat, AS STOWAWAYS, there's nothing I could have done.
Ps:the decision to leave the non-Marriott people to wait for a non-Marriott ferry was not made by ppl on the boat. It was made by a CEO elsewhere.
Also: no one died from having to wait for their own ferry.
Not Pulverman ps hmmmm did u read the last part of my post! Ceo,,corporate, same difference.
Put a scarf joint half way down the neck - leave body as is, scratches, holes, dents, whatever - don't bother covering the control cavities - pull the bridge bushings and plug holes - re-drill for angled 50's wraparound bridge - put your favorite pickup in the bridge position - leave the neck pickup hole empty - one pot only (just volume, no tone) - Jam Out! - To me that sounds like the most fun guitar in the world
This is why I don’t feed the monster that is guitar center.
I go in and look. I buy parts on the net or shows and do real business with mom and pop stores or private sellers.
This is the best music store in my area.
www.chucklevins.com/
To destroy an instrument for such petty reasons is just infuriating. _
At least my local Guitar Centers sell 'As Is', I got a Warwick Corvette German 5 string for $150 which had a broken truss rod.
As for what they throw in the dumpster I would have thought some of it is covered under ROHS and should be disposed off correctly to avoid it ending up in the landfill.
I believe this a Gibson Standard Operating Procedure. Not surprising given their recent "Play Authentic" gaffe.
This blows me away! DONATE THIS SHIT at the,very least!!
I posted this before the end of the,video.
Such a good idea donating.
Brian Marcou why donate when you can sell it for full retail? These manufacturers don't care, they want you to donate the instrument you paid for so you buy the new model at full retail.
Those manufacturers don't care is right, they buy entire wood forests for very little and produce guitars for next to nothing, they have cheap labor and cheap materials, they could destroy 100 guitars and wouldn't blink an eye because that $3500 guitar you bought earned them enough profit to build 100 more just like it.
Right on dude... donate.
its a Gibson ,its not an Indonesian/Asian guitar,the wood isn't cheap,cnc machines are 100s of thousands of dollars,some are closer to a million and labor cost in gibson is not low either,im not sure what your point is but all your points are incorrect.
gibson has to comply with VERY strict rules regarding any wood they purchase,and they do.they had a very
massive injunction due to "supposed" illegal rosewood purchasing and had all of their inventory removed by a branch of the the usa government.
I've been looking at buying a guitar, and now I know I will NEVER buy a guitar at guitar center! What a horrible atrocity it is to destroy beautiful instruments like that!
We have a Junior High school woodworking class in town here that Builds, or rebuilds Guitars, Basses, Drum shells and amp cabs ! I've donated two guitars , a Martin 12 that needs a truss rod and an Epi 6 that needs neck work. And two straight acoustics that only needed new homes ! Keeps Everybody Smilin' !!
if people get free guitars they won't need to go to Guitar Center and buy one; probably Gibson's policy as well
Name the gold top 'hammer'.
THOR! The Golden God.
The Guitologist Golden Hammer.
Anvil
ruclips.net/video/T_wS0Kw6k9c/видео.html
@@TheGuitologist Lester Dent.
This goes on in many industry's, especially grocery stores, food that is out of date but still good, Walmart is noted for keeping people away from dumpsters, everything you buy inside, can also be found out side, except for companys that actually pick up, broken, torn, opened or blemished, looks like the after concert of the who's dumpster, circa 68-70.
You're a good man, Brad, I hope your message gets through to someone. And by the way, I'm a capitalist too. It's too bad we have to qualify & make explanations for ourselves as such.
Capitalism has been responsible for the explosion in human quality of life. This is clear to any thinking individual, but it has flaws. Unnecessary WASTE should not be one of them. In fact, true capitalists hate waste. This isn't "capitalism" at all. This is some kind of twisted corporatism.
The Guitologist * Dude, I fucking love you! I would have done the same thing!
Truer words never spoken.
Just another reason to not shop at GC. They have systematically ruined most of the small music business. They deserve all the bad luck they have been having. I hated their business model from the beginning.
AudioAtmos to be honest most small businesses go under when the owner gets to retirement age and the children or grandchildren don't want nothing to do with the business. Owner liquidates and sells the business and moved to Florida. You can't blame GC or other major corporations all of the time
I have known employees of the Nashville Gibson plant and they all said that at one time, they did allow the employees to take the damaged guitars home where they would repair them to keep. They were prohibited from selling them. But you know how it always goes, some were sold with less than desired repairs and people were contacting Gibson about crappy craftsmanship. So the big boss sent them to the band saw ever since. My wife worked there for a while wiring BB King Lucille models. The guys that worked there said it was hard to watch, they really took pride in there work but had to do what they were told.
I'm pretty sure what you found is the prototype of the new Gibson "Distressed," line! 😃
Although this sounds horrible, there are legal (primarily liability, but also tax) reasons for ensuring damaged goods cannot be remarketed. Ergo, they are usually destroyed beyond repair before disposal. I am an analytical chemist, and have "traded in" good analyzers (worth >$25K) after depreciation. I asked what they would do with old analyzers, answer - destroy them so they cannot be remarketed. I finally got permission to donate some items to local schools; but, had to go through both manufacturer and my company AND the school had to sign liability waivers. Not fun.
BUT (the good news) things can be done. I am now employed with a non-profit that repurposes surplus medical goods (including equipment) for donation to qualified providers of charitable healthcare. The key is we can only donate, not sell, any item. Things can change! If you approach with manufacturer and distributor and ensure all items will ONLY be donated (never resold), you may actually get support as part of Corporate Social Responsibility actions (key phrase)!
Kind of a long comment - my Paul Harvey moment, the rest of the story...
I used to dumpster dive Ibanez's dumpster here in my state where the main east coast distribute has been since the early 1970's. I made the mistake of posting it on a website and they fenced it in. But before they did I ended up with some cool stuff. One item being the entire effects line of the early 80s schematics in Japanese in a big binder. All hand drawn`. I sold it about 10 years ago. But one cool idea I used for necks that were useless to me or broken head stocks was to make a beer tap handles which are pretty cool.
"You can find the remnants of a Les Paul gold top in the dumpster"
*HURTS INSIDE*
These companies really are a long way away from adapting to a circular economy.
Shameful they don't go thru 'the hassle' of giving these things to charity.
Too much paperwork for those folks to be charitable. Sure, all corporations talk big games concerning charity but when the checkbook comes out there is no pen and nothing comes of it.
A lot of businesses dump old gear, but they first bust it up so nobody else can use it. I was at Pitney-Bowes (mailing equipment office supplies) and saw employees carrying out all kinds of equipment, some still packed in unopened boxes, out to the dumpster. One guy was assigned to smash everything with a sledge hammer, from huge copy machines to brand new electronic scales, printers, mail sorters, etc. Afterwards they let me collect various electronic components such as digital displays, connectors, power supplies, cables, wiring, etc, (I'm a ham radio geek so I was in heaven).
I won't be buying ANYTHING from guitar center.
@ very good. Thanks for the reply. IDK anything about chromatic harmonicas. I'm gonna have to research that. Sounds interesting. Have a safe and great July 4th. 🌞😎😊
Throwing a guitar in the trash because it has a scratch😂 guitars are gonna get scratched anyway. Oh yeh and if you were an employee told to break this guitar, why don’t u just put it in your car and take it home like wtf
This kind of thing happens in almost every big retail store. if they don't destroy it and try to keep it themselves they'll get the cops called on them for theft, doesn't matter that it's gonna be trash anyway. Plus usually the person who has to smash the stuff has to do it in front of a manager so they don't really have an opportunity to anyway
Mike Farrell i used to work in a guitar center they would let us take broken equipment all time. Made a lot of money reselling amps with small problems but we’re playable enough to get a pawnshop to buy them
They’ll arrest you for stealing. I worked at Panda Express for a bit and they said if you eat any of the still fresh food at the end of the day you’d be fired and they’d call the cops on you.
@@mikelane2866 you were one of the lucky ones then cuz from what I've heard that's very much outside of the normal experience
"Brandon joel:
They’ll arrest you for stealing. I worked at Panda Express for a bit and they said if you eat any of the still fresh food at the end of the day you’d be fired and they’d call the cops on you."
that's like absolute disrespect for food! that could easily be on short supply in one day, it's not that hard to accomplish this "feat"
The guitar center Memphis had a Zack wylde signature Les Paul fall off the wall and headstock got damaged. They glued the headstock and lowered the price way down. Guitar played great. My friend almost got it but his dad bought him an SG instead.
I applaud the Memphis GC on their course of action there.
Did you find a handbook for how to click bait?
Love the channel, Best regards
haha...I think it was written by PT Barnum.
As a capitalist, I'm sure you know that the best course of action would be to fix that Les Paul to the best of your ability, sell it back to them, and just rinse & repeat when it lands back in the dumpster again.
reselling it to them would be the coolest damn thing. I beg you.
I went to the same guitar center dumpster months ago just to see if i could find anything. The night i went, i pop open the lid to the dumpster and find myself an ovation acoustic guitar. Still had strings on it. The head stock had a chunk missing from it, fretboard has some issues and the body has slight cracking, but still plays really well for coming out of a dumpster.
Restore the gibson in a video series. I've subscribed in the hopes of see it.
Yes! Same here, subscribed and shared your video on my FB, since I've got a bunch of friends who are musicians and agree with your phylosophy regarding capitalism and my view on sustainable, circular economy
Subscribed as well.
I was a luthier in NJ, and did several broken neck repairs and refinishes on Les Pauls for Guitar Center.
Matthew Richardson you said it yourself mate, "several" out of all of the ones they have
I once took back a gibson les paul studio and used my warranty to get a sg (they couldnt get me another lp studio hp for what i paid for it) and when i came for my case i found a tuner, kind of suspect since the guy said he loved that guitar and i should change the tuners
Gibson runs their damaged items through a saw. Guitar center does that before they sell it to you
THAT IS SO FUCKIN WRONG!!!!!! MAN THAT TURNS MY TUMMY!!!
I knew a guy, that worked at a music store in Chicago suburb ( Joliet,il ) and he put the headstock back on my 58 les paul jr and all you could see was a hairline crack and he saved my guitar when i was 16 for $100 bucks, he also was the only fender authorised repairman for miles !! he played in a band with my dad in the 50's and 60's what a waiste of a gold top !!! his name was Charlie Brewer !! R.I.P
I would like to see a response from GC on this, because it's indefensible.
A couple of employees have commented in the comments, but not employees close to this situation.
I used to work at gc in cherry hill nj. they are animals. they even take the guitar cord and strap out of brand new guitars so you can sell the customer they will need one. even custom shop guitars. bad news that place. stay away everybody.
scole901 Yes, buyer beware at GC. You gotta know what you're buying. If sez it comes with something, hold em to it. I bought a used Epi Casino and the web said it came with a case. It arrived at my GC in NJ all the way from Cali with out it. I showed them a screen shot where it said comes with case and demanded it. After the bs from GC employees on both coasts not doing their job. I finally got an Epi case.
I feel for you. I at times will buy used items in a thrift store, because I see value in them, and if I don't buy them, they will either be handled to much in the store, and parts begin to disappear, or trashed I feel. What bugs me is when they put the price label on a screen of a TV or computer screen. I now know of ways to get them off without destroying the screen most of the time, but before that I'd always have a mark or defect at that spot. Years back I worked at Radio Shack and we had a problem with customers buying something, and then saying it had a problem and we would find a problem and it would get trashed in the dumpster. In a day or so the same customer would be in the store with that item that was exchanged, claiming it had the same problem and they would get another replacement. Eventually we found out that they were taking that same item out of the dumpster and bringing it back as if it was the one they bought. From that point on we were told to destroy anything that might be usable before putting it in the trash dumpster. It this case they were radio controlled cars. The manager marked one at a unique spot and put it out there and then when it came around from that customer, he knew it was from our dumpster. This is one reason why they destroy stuff before putting it in the dumpster.
But darn-it if it is a minor repair, fix it and sell it for at least the time and parts you put in it, if the repair customer does not want to pay for the repair, or else post it on E-bay or Craigs list as is. PS: people everywhere need to learn how to fix things again as well.