Graham Greenbag
Well-known member
Another reason you shouldn't spend hundreds on something without seeing it first.
I'm genuinely mystified why people recommend buying musical instruments online. I'd only ever buy an instrument unseen unless it was so cheap I didn't mind losing the money.
Yes, a difficult situation for both sellers and buyers. I don’t think that you need to be mystified but rather to start to consider purchases as a buyer rather than (as I think you once were) a shop keeper. Shop keepers and buyers vary enormously and over the years I’ve met shop keepers who treat their customers very badly and rubbed shoulders with buyers only who want to pay a small fraction of an item’s true cost. Truly honest small shop sellers are, in my experience, few and far between. Whilst sympathetic to their problems I find that my own local shops typically over price items and want to sell me what they happen to have in stock regardless of what my own preferences are. I have lived in several different places and always found that a big percentage of shop keepers regard customers as people for them to exploit. Of course I’ve occasionally found shops that are genuinely helpful and aim to sell things at a reasonable price, when I can I will give them my custom and even pay a little more for things from them than I might elsewhere.
Sometimes the product that the customer wants can’t reasonably be held by a small shop. The product might be high value and/or so low in demand that a potential sale is far into the future whilst shelf space and money is tied up holding the item. In such a case both shop and customer seem best served if the item is purchased elsewhere. There is always a pragmatic case for buying a specialist item from a distant supplier, though there are risks for the buyer and sometimes the seller too.
I notice that you have a Uke from Sweden and that you love it (it’s a super instrument and made by a top bloke) but there are many luthiers in the U.K. that you could have used, perhaps they are mystified as to why you didn’t use one of them instead.
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