Alan Ratcliffe wrote
vic wrote
Re. the Tokai RRP's above...these guits are NOT cheap hey....
Well, no, they are not cheap guitars, but rather well-priced expensive guitars. About half the price of the equivalent Gibson model.
I guess the LS160 will be close to R25k ? and even higher for their '58/59 flametops ?
LS160S is about R22K (depending on exchange rate the day it lands). An LS370 would be about R50K by my reckoning and an LS470 about R65K- R70K (admittedly educated guesses though).
It's just such a damn shame that SA retailers can't get down to the Japanese manufacturer-suggested retail prices as their starting offer. The music madness prices should be the opening prices, imo. With a special sale price two grand lower still. But this seems to be in the nature of SA music store economics, and I won't pretend to fully understand them.
The problem being that people compare these prices to
American Gibson prices, instead of what they went for in the stores here. A Gibson LP Standard might go for $2100 - putting it on a par with the LS150 retail price in SA. But in SA, a Les Paul Standard went for way over R30k. If you look at the take2 price: R35K (
http://more.take2.co.za/moreusa-gibson-les-paul-standard-electric-guitar-ebony-b001b696oi.html)
Someone recently priced new Epiphone Les Pauls in a store at over R10k. It's not that the Tokai prices are high. It's that the SA retail prices are very high. We've discussed it to death. It's just that we shouldn't look at the Tokai prices in isolation and say they're high - because by that logic, so are the Epiphone prices.
At least the musicmadness prices are pretty reasonable for new Tokais.
