Fender is selling pre-owned instruments. That's right - used guitars & basses. These will be certified by Fender themselves & would definitely list for less than fresh units. Some implications:
- For this to happen, Fender has to buy these instruments from some place. Would be interesting to know where these are from. If the manufacturer buys direct from individuals, we are at the losing end because we are not located in the USA. Heck, we are not even nearby.
- Fender is indirectly saying, hey... our instruments are getting more unaffordable & pricing many of you out, so here are some used ones as consolation, we aren't gonna make anything more affordable anytime soon
- What does it mean for local distributors - would they be getting these instruments from Fender to be re-sold locally? That would mean, the re-sale ones here are gonna be hit price-wise. People would really consider buying used Fenders from Fender rather than the local re-sellers, yes?
- Fender is affected by the used instrument market whether they are admitting it or not so the wise thing to do is control the used market. There, problem solved.
Pic: Fender
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Perspective from the US (sold guitars and managed a store for 25 years and have played for almost 60 and still many connections in the musical instrument industry. First guitar sales here have been down for over year now (last fall it was reported that Fender dealers cancelled over $300M in scheduled orders for guitars and over $100M orders for amps and Fender had layoffs in California). Both Fender and Gibson already sell guitars direct to the consumer here and have for some time (at MAP prices). And earlier this summer, Fender had a direct to the consumer sale at prices below MAP which infuriated dealers here. The consensus here is that the guitar market is glutted. Now I have read the whole official release from Fender about this and the "used" guitars the are talking about selling appear to be coming from primarily 3 sources: (1) defective guitars that have been retired from dealers and then reworked (2) new guitars that have been sold to dealers and then taken back-generally this is only done for large dealers (3) excess new stock that Fender wants to move and selling them as "used" gets around the whole MAP pricing thing-selling new guitars as "used" to get around MAP is already being done in the US by dealers here in the US who need to move stock especially now that sales are down and people have less disposable income. I personally know of people who have bought used guitars (including Fenders) off of Reverb etc. at used prices that were substantially below new MAP prices and got brand new guitars still sealed in the factory packaging.
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