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What???  Guitar Center has inexperienced and inattentive salespeople???  Really???
 
Heh.
 
Of course, adding Unions are just a scam that will hurt everyone since nothing will change except that the prices of gear will go up to pay the Union people who just sit on their collective asses and do nothing.
 
The answer is quite simple:  If you don't like working there, then go somewhere else!  Only once GC can't get enough people to employ will conditions improve there.

I think these statements were the most telling:
 
"Here's the bottom line - A strong Guitar Center is good for the entire music business, especially at the moment. Happier and better trained employees would lead to more satisfied customers and stronger sales, which once again, is good for everyone.

The company is now being run by Ares Management, who recently took over from Bain Capital, two investment firms that have demonstrated their interest more in bottom line profits at any cost rather than happy employees and customers."
 
Good and knowledgeable sales staff aren't going to put up with BS and low pay.  Personally, I order most of my gear from Sweetwater and Audiodeluxe.  My rep at Sweetwater has a good knowledge base and gets me fair pricing.  I have nothing against GC, but my experiences there have always been lacking.  I think folks are going to start looking to them as a showroom, much like they do Best Buy now.  They will look and feel there and purchase elsewhere/online.  Unless you have a boutique music store in your town that you frequent, GC, unfortunately, may be the only game in town for some folks.
 
Greed is not good.

kson
I think folks are going to start looking to them as a showroom, much like they do Best Buy now.  They will look and feel there and purchase elsewhere/online.
 

 
I completely agree!
 
GC has gotten a lot of my money over the years (over $40k during the main year I was building my studio - I worked out an agreement with a really good salesperson who's goal was to become manager and I bought everything from him at $2 over cost - he made manager).  When I moved up here, I tried to set up the same type of agreement and it worked for a while, but then the guy I was working with quit and went to Apple Music.  
 

I love going into GC and asking questions...I will wander around until one of them will honestly reply "I don't know". That will be the guy I'll work with. Some of the BS these 20 year olds try to pull makes me laugh.

GC is the last place I'll go to if I want to pick someone's brain. It's good for the following things:
 
1) Buying strings
2) Killing an hour with some acoustic guitars
 
I walk past a Guitar Center every day so buying strings is never a hassle. I know what I want and they know by now that I'm not going to check my fricken bag at the door just to buy a set of .011's. So that's all cool. 
 
And if I want to kill an hour with some acoustic noodling, I'm not going to do that in a small intimate guitar store where you're the center of attention. I'll do it in a vast corporate chain where nobody gives a rat's ass if you're just shooting the breeze. 

They just ignore me when I walk in, these days. Like you Sharke, they have figured out that I am there to buy what I came in for.

I do like it that you can pretty much pull anything off the wall and still play it and try it out. I do the same as you Sharke. I have one very close to work and I will wonder in just to play around with the instrument and kill an hour.

It was easy for me to have GC pretty much to myself back in the day.  I would just walk in as a mature guy with a corporate haircut, lots of money, no tattoos and nice clothes.  This would prevent any of their normal sales guys from noticing I was there.  LOL.

I wonder which of the Vegas store is unionized (is that the word)?
 
In my experience, GC is nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to music stores. I've seen as bad and even worst in smaller local music shops everywhere I've lived - and the worst I've had the displeasure to deal with were way beyond anything I've encountered at CG.
 
I've also seen stores where you had the weirdest mix of helpful and knowledgeable clerks and the most indifferent, arrogant pricks in the same department.
 
The weirdest I've seen was this local store were the clerks were all borderline useless but who hired those girls you'd expect to see behind the counter in a wild night clubs to work the cash register.  I guess they thought that this would give you a reason to come back and spend more $.

And that being said, my biggest reason to avoid music stores unless absolutely necessary is the customers, not the clerks.
 
I don't know how anyone can put up with that noise 8 hours a day.