BTW, remember when the furniture chain Melodys were the Gibson importers? Djeez, they had loads of guitars, but the guys didnt know how to sell them or service customers.
I remember those days - another masterstroke of Gibson corporate thinking. "Gee these furniture guys move a lot of furniture, so they should be able to move lots of guitars too! What's the difference? Product is product!" The guys at Melody's didn't know their F-holes from their A-holes - if you ordered a Les Paul, they often sent Epiphones by mistake, as a result, the only shops that ended up stocking them were Melody's own stores.
Do you think all those guitars went back to the US when they folded? Or are they still in a warehouse somewhere?
It's never worthwhile to send a defective unit back, quite aside from the transport costs in both directions (which you bear) you don't get duties back and will be charged again when the repaired unit or replacement comes in - so you end up having paid transport costs across the Atlantic four times, double clearance fees and double duties. The manufacturers who replace a defective unit often do so without asking for the old one back. Anyway AFAIK, Gibson still do not replace defective units, they see repairs and returns as the responsibility of the distributor - a small price for you to pay in return for the great honour they are bestowing on you in allowing you to be the distributor of their great and historic products. Uh-huh.
The Melody's guitar returns used to go back on the floor by all accounts, waiting for someone to buy them who didn't know the difference. If they had any left in stock when they lost the agency, they would likely have been passed on to Marshall's as part of "transfer of existing stock" - I don't know for sure, but that's often how it goes.
Andrew Terry had a different approach - If it needed repair, it was fixed. If it was beyond repair or would cost more to repair than to replace, he would have me do what I could just to get it playable, then once a year he would hold a public sale and sell off whatever had accumulated through the year for whatever he could get.
