Mad Chatter

If you buy gear from Guitar Center, the salesperson will likely ask you if you’d like to buy one of these warranties on the product.  Best Buy does the same thing with their service plans. So do other retailers.  You’ll have to judge for yourself whether purchasing such a warranty/service plan is right for you.  With respect to the GC warranty program, here are few things I learned that the salesperson didn’t disclose when I bought it:

• A separate company administers the warranty plan
• You cannot take the broken/damaged item back to GC and expect to walk out with a new/repaired one (see first bullet)
• You have to call the warranty company, explain the situation and then they send you a box to pack the item in and ship to an “inspection site”
• Presumably the inspection process is meant to ferret out misuse of the product
• If the product passes inspection, the company mails you a check (I can’t tell you what happens if it does not pass inspection, but my guess is you get nothing)
• The check is for the amount you paid for the product – not replacement value –so if you got it on sale, it may not be enough to buy an identical replacement
• The check is payable to you and GC, so you can’t use it elsewhere
• Don’t be surprised if the sales staff have no clue how to process the warranty check

Just to be clear, if you break a cymbal (which I do with painful frequency) and you have a gig the next night, your GC warranty isn’t going to save you in time for the gig. Don’t let the warranty lull you into a sense of security against short-notice gear emergencies. You’ll need a back-up contingency plan that doesn’t involve the GC warranty program. 

Don’t mistake my comments as GC bashing.  The warranty worked for me and I would purchase it again (and I did).  You just need to be aware of how it works before you buy it. 

Tags: music stores, musical gear

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Gear, Stores. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.