Price jump on guitars?

paddylonglegs

Just saw a Taylor guitar that I had my eye on before Christmas jump from €850 to over €1k! Yikes, a 20% jump really is huge, is it normal for prices to jump like that? Frustrating when you've been putting away your hard earned only to find you're not quite there yet!

DesperateDan

You should try haggling, "You've only got €800 and it's for your sick cousin"

ednwireland

Euro to usd exchange rate as new stock comes in maybe?

paddylonglegs

DesperateDan wrote: »

You should try haggling, "You've only got €800 and it's for your sick cousin"

Yeah I feel like doing that to be honest. I'm a leftie too so not much other selection unfortunately. Ok that was a bit of a rant post yesterday but still think a jump like that is crazy.

FR85

I think it might also have something to do with timbers used and fluctuations in price of said timber.

Gibson a couple of years ago had a lot of wood confiscated if memory serves me correctly due to them not being able to account for where certain batches came from, again this has to do with forest preservation and certain proteced trees. This is why the quality of Gibsons dipped over the last couple of years, recent J-200's have been horrible so much so that they have installed a pre-amp.

If the guitar you are currently looking at is the EXACT same one as a few months ago then no there shouldn't have been a price hike but if it's similar and from a different batch then this might explain it.

martinedwards

Haven't been watching exchange rates recently, but they do fluctuate.

if Taylor sell the guitar trade for..... lets say $500.... and the € goes up against the $ by 20% then the guitar costs the shop an extra $100.

wood prices vary too. 20 years ago Koa was a quirky weirdo wood that no-one did commercially since Fender used it for the skunk stripe on the back of strat necks in the 50s.

now?

cheapest you'll get a boring set of Koa for an acoustic is around $350.

really pretty figures stuff?

$1500 and UP!

add all the other parts, and labour, and a Koa acoustic has quadrupled in the last 10 years.

Ravelleman

The exchange rate is definitely a factor in recent price jumps. After Christmas a lot of Fender stuff was going for considerably less than now - I imagine it's new stock that has been bought at less favourable rates.

At times though, some sudden price jumps are just music shops taking customers for a ride. I have observed Richtone Music, for example, raising the price of older stock when price increases come down from the manufacturers, presumably so they can just skim the cream from the top themselves.

Before buying you should keep an eye on Thomann and MusicStore prices over a couple of days or weeks. They seem to be controlled by some kind of algorithm as they both move up and down to reflect one another's prices each time they change. Some of the price changes seem completely arbitrary.

I just got a Fender AV '64 Tele from MusicStore for a ridiculously low price after observing them for the last month. No idea why it was suddenly so low but I'm happy I checked.