DrGonzo wrote:
Ja I was quite excited about the Guitar Center story, only to find great dissapointment at what they can actually ship to SA... its like a couple of pedals, amps and guitars, nearly all of them i had never heard of of...
I don't think this is even a Guitar Center thing. Any brand is going to protect their appointed suppliers in whatever territory. I'd venture that it's not a question of not shipping XYZ brand to SA, but of not shipping XYZ brand to any country where XYZ has appointed a supplier. I'd further venture that this restriction is imposed by XYZ.
if you going international, E-bay is the way to go me thinks...
but still for a large product like an amp, i have heard you will get burned quite a bit on various taxes and duties.
A sad state of affairs all in all...
Unfortunate, but I'm not convinced we're being ripped off in by suppliers who are out to wring every last drop of blood from a stone. It's a consequence of the length of supply chains and the markup applied at each stage of the game.
A while back there was some speculating on the forum about how a certain retailer was going to charge hugely inflated prices on a brand they'd recently accquired a franchise for. The argument went on that we should rather support a small, independent supplier not recognised by the brand itself. First a quick bit of arithmetic showed that, in fact, the small supplier was ? marking up and you paid significantly more for those items here than you would have in the country of origin. Then when the big bad retailer announced their prices they compared very favourably to the small supplier (who did not have the expense of running a physical shop, and who did not provide the same convenience that a shop does).
So, yes, we pay more here. Well you pay more for Fender amps in the UK than you do in the USA. We're at the end of long chains here, and that pushes prices up. Our volumes are low and that means our suppliers don't get discounts for bulk orders, and that pushes prices up too. I'm not saying that's good or that we should have a party, but it aint necessarily so that we're being ripped off by unscrupulous businesses.
