Youtube guy finds Les Paul in Guitar Center Dumpster

irjason

irjason

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Nov 17, 2001
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#1
The Guitologist on youtube occasionally dumpster dives at Guitar Center and finds some decent stuff sometimes. Cables, stands, picks, magazines, etc...

So in his latest video he finds a Les Paul in the dumpster. Unfortunately, it is in really rough shape. Check out the video if you want to hear the whole story, but it's a pretty good example of corporate waste. I'm not a Guitar Center hater but I know this kind of thing isn't doing anything good for Guitar Center or the customers.


I guess I should also say I am not, nor do I know the Guitologist! At first he had kind of inspired me to give this a try sometime at my local Guitar Center. But then I realized from scenery in his videos (and his accent) my Guitar Center is his Guitar Center. Small world...
 
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#2
I didn't watch the video, but don't judge GC about it. There may be a legitimate reason for broken merchandise in a dumpster.

Many years ago, I worked for a department store. There was a tiffany-style lamp with a missing glass piece in the shade. I was told to destroy it and put it in the dumpster. I asked if I could just take it home. They said no way! If the item was defective and destroyed, the store could get reimbursed by the vendor for a defective item. If they gave it to me or if it were thrown away in usable condition, the store would received no income for the item, but would still needed to pay the vendor for the inventory. I went out to the dumpster, crushed the lampshade and beat the lamp base on the dumpster until it fell apart.

It's just business.
 
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#4
bwildt said:
Many years ago, I worked for a department store. There was a tiffany-style lamp with a missing glass piece in the shade. I was told to destroy it and put it in the dumpster. I asked if I could just take it home. They said no way! If the item was defective and destroyed, the store could get reimbursed by the vendor for a defective item. If they gave it to me or if it were thrown away in usable condition, the store would received no income for the item, but would still needed to pay the vendor for the inventory. I went out to the dumpster, crushed the lampshade and beat the lamp base on the dumpster until it fell apart.

It's just business.
Click to expand...

Martin is the same way about their "scratch and dent" stuff. A friend had a music store and was a Martin dealer. They had a Martin guitar that had been sawed in half cleanly and straight down the middle. It was actually pretty cool looking. They had it on a glass cabinet with couple of strings on it. You could look underneath and see the inside. They had been ordered to destroy it and did that instead.

As to repairing the one in the video...a friend had one in much worse shape. A bandmate found a guitar case on the side of the road and figured he would snag it to use. When he picked it up it had a Gibson Les Paul in it. He was a lefty, so he gave it to the guitar player. We figured it was a divorce guitar. Some crazy woman getting back at her husband. Similar damage to the one above without the broken head stock. Someone had hammered it and gouged it with a screwdriver and had destroyed the pickups and ripped out the electronics. The fretboard had been peeled back from the nut to about the 8th fret. He restored it to like new. It took a ton of bondo and paint, but it played really nice.

BnB
 
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#6
Yeah, I probably should have mentioned this as part of my first post. It really only makes me more curious. I don't know about this particular model, but I know some Les Pauls can be pretty pricey. Must have been a pretty costly mixup to fix!
 
#9
Sad'ish but makes perfect sense to me. There's nothing to be gaines by gibson having another gibson with a repaired headstock out in the wild.

Cool that folks are resucing them though. I once dived at GC and scavenged some tuners and bridge off a cheap Recording King acoustic. I don't know if it was already broken, but it had been bashed to bits before being tossed in the dumpster.
 
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