"Sales" at Sam Ash fire sale?
- Thread starter jazzarian
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Last week an old friend was passing through town, and he asked me if I'd seen any good deals at Sam Ash. I told him he might get a great deal on a tumbleweed. He went anyway, and sent me this cheerful photo:
The end of an era that was never all that great to begin with.
The end of an era that was never all that great to begin with.
AutomationBias
Roadie
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That's depressing as hell. I remember going into Sam Ash on my first trip to NYC as a teenager in the early 90s and being floored by how awesome it was.
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Same here. First place I ever set my eyes on a YJM Strat. I don't think I'd ever seen anything that expensive before LOL.
That photo is from the New Haven store, which was never the NYC store, of course. But it used to be... something. They'd always gone through cycles of being kind of hip and being kind of sad and repeat (usually corresponding with how healthy the local music scene was.) Maybe 5 years ago they got some fresh managers in, and I was hopeful they were turning things around, but here we are. I'm sure COVID did them no favors.
OrganicZed
Roadie
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Didn't guitar sales go up during the lockdowns? Many people had extra free time and wads of cash from government handouts so they did the sensible thing and bought more gear.
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Short answer: I don't really know.
Question to your question: Is that metric for sales in general, or sales in brick and mortar stores? I know, for instance, that sales in some sectors (perhaps guitars?) went up, but that's inclusive of online shopping.
I know that in some parts of the country/world the pandemic didn't really impact day to day behaviors much at all, but here in New England, we hardly walked into public places, except out of absolute necessity, for several months. So basically what you have is a prolonged period where the tendency to shop online was even more firmly entrenched. "Post-COVID", those consumer habits will continue to take a toll on anyone trying to sell anything out of a storefront. (E.g., we're still having our groceries delivered, because I discovered along the way that there's no reason to spend two hours a week yelling at clouds about how everything's been rearranged, and what I'm looking for is in the "All the Ingredients" aisle SMH, FML, etc.)
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OrganicZed
Roadie
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JiveTurkey
Goatlord
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I heard the announcement and took a look through their site and I felt like there really was zero connection to the search results I was getting and the fire sale verbiage I was reading. Sucks for them certainly and hopefully it is as painless as a situation like this could be.
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Again and as usual, my best answer is, "I don't know." But I imagine store managers are expected to keep their numbers well into the black in order to justify any given store's existence. (In recent memory New Haven has been a ghost town.) Bottom line from a corporate perspective: if online sales are hugely profitable, and brick and mortar sales are a trickle (or perhaps even lossy), then why continue with the latter?
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That’s because they’ve never put work into their online presence. I think for a brief period you were able to shop their used sections by stores, but that was VERY short lived and trying to navigate their site has always been as blegh as walking into the stores.
Byrdman
Shredder
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The closest one for me was in Orlando, and it was a great store 20+ years ago. I stopped by that store around 5-7 years ago and it was dirty, dusty, and felt like I was walking thorough a Kmart before they shut down. I believe they cleaned up their act and tried to make it nicer when GC's started popping up all over, but I never went back to it after that last time.
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in all the years of guitar interneting, I don't think I've ever once been on their site. I don't think I've ever seen it come up within the first few google pages on a piece of gear either. If you told me they never had a site to begin with I'd believe you
AutomationBias
Roadie
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From some cursory Googling it looks like they were overleveraged. Too many stores, borrowed too much money.
itchyfingers
Roadie
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Our local store was always pretty well stocked, and had more knowledgeable employees compared to GC. Not much in the way of deals, so I'm betting they'll just shift all that inventory to a liquidation company.
I had bought some instructional books from Sam Ash about 2 years ago, and started getting a lot of texts from them. Over the past year, they’ve had multiple 15-20% sales with no restrictions on manufacturers. All inventory was to shipped directly from stores. I’m not sure if they were already trying to offload store inventory then. I thought about getting a Martin 000-15M at 20% off, but didn’t want one sight unseen.
Those sales were better than the sales during this store closing sale.
Those sales were better than the sales during this store closing sale.
Good one!
I take it you are old enough to remember when Sam Ash bought up all the other guitar stores in midtown, like Manny's? It's come full circle. Amazon kismet.
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Hell, I'm old enough to remember when the Dutch bought up midtown itself.
I was either in college or too early in my career to be able to get anything out of those 48th St stores. Around the times those stores were closing, it seemed like people online were referring to them as tourist destinations rather than go-to stores for shopping. The Guitar Center at 14th St, which was newly opened at the time, had more inventory that was less abused and in my price range at the time.
metropolis_4
Rock Star
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I assumed this had more to do with Sam Ash passing away than a shortage of business or a change in the guitar market
TSJMajesty
Rock Star
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I seem to remember at most, it was 3 checks, that didn't even total a typical mortgage payment.
If you're not working, that doesn't seem like wads of cash.
