Do you save any money buying a guitar when the market is bad?

It might be worth it. Or not.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks as I write this in late March 2020, you know that stock markets across the world have been tanking. Many retailers have been selling off their inventories quick, but does this mean you'll get a good deal on a guitar right now?

No, with the exception of a scant few. I'll talk about that in a moment.

Since around late 2017, the guitar and guitar accessories market has been in a slump. Why? Several reasons. The passing of trends, the fact you can buy a $300 guitar that's just as good as a $3,000 guitar these days because of modern machining (with more guitar players becoming aware of this every day), the fact there are many really good videos on YouTube showing how to build guitars for next to nothing, and so on.

The prices set for guitars right now won't change, because guitar manufacturers aren't beholden to what happens in the stock market. And the reason for that is because there is almost no guitar company out there that's publicly traded on the market.

For example, Fender - the biggest of the big - is a private company. They tried going public years ago, it didn't work and they've remained a private company ever since. The vast majority of other guitar makers also operate privately. The only ones that don't are companies like Yamaha where guitar manufacturing isn't their primary business.

Now as far as those scant few guitar sellers that do offer deals during bad market times, this only applies to boutique electrics. As in guitars that sell for $5,000 or more.

When the market takes a dive, some upper end guitar stores will discount the boutique stuff as much as 40%. This sounds awesome, but I can assure you it's not. The 40% is only taken off the guitars nobody wants. If a guitar store has a boutique guitar but it's just plain fugly (and there are more than just a few of those) and has a price tag of $7,500, then sure, they'll discount that as low as $4,500. But they were going to do that anyway at some point just to get rid of the stupid thing, bad market or not.

That super "cool" Fender Custom Shop Masterbuilt guitar you want real bad that's selling for $7,000? The price won't go down. Not happening. Regardless of how bad the market gets, the price of that will stay right where it is. Deep discounts only happen to the other boutique guitars you don't want.

If you want something cool, get the Strat seen at top. It's still selling at the old price before Fender raised theirs (yet again). That's actually a good deal for what it is.

Published 2020 Mar 26