From my experience with Terry Carter, this is much more than a choice of how to market your business. This is just another example of who he is as a person. Some may say it's only business, but it's so much more than that. When I attempted to trade in two of my ukuleles to ULTP for a particular ukulele I wanted, it was a horrible experience. I told myself it was a bad idea to do a trade in, but I didn't listen to my instinct and I hadn't heard anything bad about ULTP at the time. Anyway, he held my instruments for a month with no response about trade in amount. I had to contact him saying please just send my instruments back to me. Then he tried to get me on the phone to talk about the instruments when we had only had contact over text and email. My instincts said get everything in writing. He tried calling several times, but I would only respond though written communication to have all convo on record. He finally sent a text saying the Pono MB had a non functional truss rod and was buzzing. I bought this instrument from him. He said he could fix it by putting in a new saddle. He didn't mention that this was a warranty issue with Pono. He wanted to charge me for a new saddle and ignore the "nonfunctional" truss rod. I brought up Pono's warranty which he should have done for me as the person who sold the instrument to me. When I said I wanted to move forward with this as a warranty concern to Pono, he said he needed to talk to his luthiers again to make sure he had the info correctly as to the truss rod. I immediately wrote back that he had just told me in writing about his concerns with the broken truss rod. He knew he had been caught. I had it in writing so he couldn't go back on what he said. He said he would contact Pono about it and said he left a voicemail with them. I didn't trust him for a minute so I emailed Pono and got a response within the hour from John Kitakis. John was very nice and promised to work with Terry to replace the Pono, but John seemed very troubled by the idea of a broken truss rod, said that it was not a very common thing. Terry was pissed at me. Long story short, I ended up getting the Pono replacement directly from John because Terry was being incredibly passive aggressive because I didn't let him get away with conning me. I caught him in his game and exposed him to Pono. It was an incredibly stressful experience with a person who truly does not care about his customers. He wants to make as much money as he can and will rip you off to do it. As a retailer, if the truss rod was actually not working, he should have taken responsibility for that and taken the steps with Pono to get a replacement. Instead, he tried to get money out of me for an instrument he sold me that according to him was defective. I expressed my disappointment that he did not mention Pono's warranty and I had to tell him to move forward with it. He didn't take any responsibility for that. He talked about his expensive guitars and how he doesn't check truss rods and a bunch of other nonsense instead of taking responsibility. He is condescending and seems to only care about what he can get out of a customer. The other instrument involved in this trade in was not purchased from him, but he said the bridge was coming off and would need to be replaced and he could do that for me. I just told him to send it back to me and so I lost money shipping it to him and paying to have it shipped back.
When I didn't know any better before this fiasco happened, I bought a ukulele from him and paid 35.00 for the basic setup. When I received the ukulele, the C string buzzed terribly. I tried multiple string changes and nothing fixed it. I had to use the Super glue method to raise the nut slot because it was extremely low. I have since had to put glue in a different nut slot after changing strings and I am a very light fingerstyle player. So I paid 35.00 for them to mess up my bone nut. They didn't take responsibility for that either. So I can't speak highly of his luthiers or him. There is more to this trade in situation that shows what kind of person Terry Carter is and I have all texts and emails saved. I hope no one else will go through what I went through. I don't care about his car salesman shtick, he can present himself however he wants, but I do care about how people are treated. I do care about community, taking responsibility when you make mistakes, and treating people with respect. I don't just see him as a person who has chosen a particular business model, I see him as a crook who only cares about making money. And check out his real-estate/life coach scheme if you want to see even more of his money talk and grifting. He boasts of his multiple 6 figure businesses. I feel like many of us have been trying to show the world what kind of person Terry Carter is so they won't be hurt by him for awhile now. I'm so glad he made a video to show a little bit of who he truly is. Of course he took it down, but he will crack again. It's only a matter of time.
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