Death of a (Music) Salesman

By Jack Osterhage | December 9, 2020 |

(Osterhage, 11/17/2020; The signature guitar wall as viewed through the lens of construction)

At 159 Massachusetts Avenue, there lies a music shop. As the bell dings signaling your entrance, one employee hails the textbook greeting; at least one other stands aloof somewhere in the store, but there are never more than three. Browse its wares and you’ll find not a one missing: everything is perfectly stocked. One could credit the diligence of the employees for this feat, but the truth is, nothing is ever sold, hence nothing is ever absent. You may feel inclined to make a purchase—not at the importune of the employees, though, who wouldn’t dare pester you at the expense of a pleasant shopping experience—but if you don’t, you’ll leave as if never there at all, perhaps with the realization that you were the lone customer in the place.

To think this description matches your standard mom-and-pop shop is not unfounded, especially considering the size of 159 Mass. Ave., roughly on par. Imagine my surprise, then, upon my first arrival to the place, when the bold face lettering on its glass-doored façade read: GUITAR CENTER. In fact, if I hadn’t Google-mapped Guitar Center Berklee prior, nothing else about the building would have signaled that I stood before a franchise of the largest music retailer chain in the United States. As long as I’ve lived in Boston (only a few months, granted), scaffolding has occupied the sidewalk in front of the store, obscuring its logo as well as its very entrance. This construction is the result of a fallen piece of fallen piece of the building, a metaphor for the dilapidation of the store and a literal hazardous warning for potential customers. For comparison, here’s a picture of the sister store in downtown Boston:

Guitar center

(Screenshot from Google Streetview)

(Osterhage, 11/17/2020; Improvised sanitizer dispenser)

“The goal based on the schedule is for everyone to be on five days, for x amount of time. Because we are short staffed. You saw when you came in—"

There were three.

“—there were three of us. That was all of us in the store.”

…

As long as you’ve been working there, has it always been short staffed?

“Always…Going as a customer in 2015, there were seven people working in that store: You had three people working in the front, one person working the guitar department, one person working in the back in the pro audio department. Beautiful setup. Plus, you had two managers in the back, and two techs [tech supports]. (After a pause) The store made a lot of money back then. It doesn’t help that we see the worst foot traffic of any Guitar Center, ever, through most of the months…”

As to why the store has been chronically understaffed during his tenure, my informant has no idea, and I can’t blame him. It’s entirely counterintuitive for any store to be reducing the number of available positions if, in doing so, the store consistently loses money. Unless, of course, that store is no longer intended to make large sums of money. Our situation becomes not a fallacy, but a scheme. “Remember, when I checked you out, I asked if you were a Berklee student?” That’s right. “I’d give you ten percent off.” Berklee, it seems, has foreseen the futility in renting out a building to a failing industry. This attitude seeps into its management of the store, too, and employees’ roles in it, left to their own devices without a guiding force:

 

How much of your job is ringing up numbers, anyway?

“All of it. Hundred percent. That’s all they care, that’s what our official job title is. What they really make us do is: run the store. We have to do everything. They might have, while I’m trying to do a transaction, go grab an online order from the back…Sometimes I have to receive packages from the UPS guy. Sometimes I have to pack up something to ship the next morning.”

 

So, you do whatever they tell you, in a sense?

 

“You do everything. And it’s not whatever you’re told, because no one’s telling you to do anything. It’s this weird dynamic of, you know what you need to do to make this store run, and no one’s going to tell you it, but if you don’t do it, they’re pissed anyway.”

(Osterhage, 11/17/2020; Microphones wrapped in safety coverings)

On April 24, 2020, Rolling Stone magazine published an article titled, “Sales of Instruments and Music Gear are Soaring. Will Quarantine Spark a Renaissance?” In it, Samantha Hissong presents the reader with a series of first quarter sales statistics from retailers including Sweetwater, Reverb, Apple (with their Garageband software), and, you guessed it, Guitar Center: “…one of the top trends spotted by Guitar Center—where online sales more than doubled following the shelter-in-place mandate—shows that people are taking the opportunity to learn an instrument they have never played before” (Hissong). My informant reported much the same observation: “One thing that we saw right before everyone locked down is, all the music stores were flooded with people buying gear for the first time. I’ve never seen that many first-time customers in my life.”

The book lovers among you may remember a tantamount occurrence in 2011: the bankruptcy and subsequent closing of Borders. Go back and look at the sales figures, and you’ll find that, just before shutdown, sales spiked. What we’re seeing now with these music stores isn’t the beginning of a rebirth come the post-COVID world; it’s a death rattle at the hands of COVID, a premature one at that. Without COVID, they might have a stood a chance, lasted at least a bit longer, but what we’ve seen of the response to COVID in every field—education, industry, business—is the very cause of Borders’ downfall: an accelerated rush into the digital world.

You see, Borders had a rival chain. At the height of bookstore popularity, these two dominated. In 2007, Amazon launched the Kindle, the crux at which these two divulged. One chain refurbished its stores and expanded its physical plant; the other pulled back, invested it its online sales and eventually developed its own e-reader, the Nook, in 2009. Today, Barnes and Noble is left standing. Survival of the fittest, true to our capitalistic economic model. B&N had an advantage, though, over music stores facing the same crisis now: they could prepare. No one prepared for COVID-19. How could they? As much as I loved Borders, I cannot help but feel they caused their own demise by refusing to adapt to the sign of the times. Music stores, on the other hand, cannot be faulted for their upheaval in this pandemic turn of events. And yet, the only way for them to survive is to evolve, to digitize. Even for the better off, the pace is too fast. For GC Berklee, on unstable footing since before the dawn of COVID, the die was cast a long time ago. 119 Mass. Ave. will be up for lease by the end of this pandemic.

Those concerned that I may act as the harbinger of doom for GC Berklee employees, don’t worry; they already know. To quote my informant in reference to some of the more sensitive information he divulged, “I’m on my way out anyway.” For him, Guitar Center is a means of making ends meet. His true passion lies with his ‘real’ job as the second in command teacher at one of Boston’s premier music education institutions, leading musical theatre and rock ensembles. Hear for yourself the passion with which he talks about this position:

Why not work your average nine-to-five then? For this salesman, it can be surmised in the word he and I accidentally invented and shared during our conversation, ‘passionize,’ meaning, to create a passion for something. Earlier I quoted our transaction, during which he asked if I was a Berklee student with the intent to give me a discount. I’m not. “But I did it anyway,” he then said. “I’m not supposed to, but I do it anyway because it builds good roll with the people, keeps the people comfortable—” And returning? “—Yeah, they return; that’s usually the bargaining chip we use, being sleazeball salespeople (whoops ironically), and I’ll say that wholeheartedly.” Being a Guitar Center employee, to him, means helping people, even if it means losing out on a bigger commission. I had come in that day looking for a 3.5mm cable; I didn’t leave with a ProGear card subscription or extraneous purchases, but with the cable I wanted, discounted, and with a new connection—a new friend.

(Osterhage, 11/17/2020; Salesman on break practicing guitar)

The death of music stores is something to be mourned. Each time I visited GC Berklee was a positive experience. Due to the nature of fieldwork, I became somewhat of a regular at the store; the employees knew me by name, and we always struck up conversation, typically along the lines of, “How’s your day going?” to which they would usually reply, “Slow.” The few times other customers came in, every available employee jumped to be of assistance and proved equally helpful as with myself on the occasions I became a shopper. Off duty, they bantered and strummed instruments; lunch breaks were filled with laughter, and although the days paced at a crawl, their faces were bored, but never disinterested.

Online shopping has an alien twinge to it without human interaction, without people watching, without friendly faces. The placid ambiance of background radio hits is removed from the equation. Just as the scent of a paperback book is unmatched, so too is the stereotypical demeanor of a Guitar Center employee, or the earnest presence of the mom-and-pop shop owner--because if GC topples, those will go with it, clinging for dear life. The residual imprint of the acoustic guitar styled logo will become a relic of the past, another Blockbuster video ticket outline. Only one question remains: Who will be the next victim on music retail’s death row?

Addendum:

On November 22, around 12p.m., news broke that Guitar Center has filed for bankruptcy. I had no prior knowledge of this transgression, nor did it influence my research or writing process. Let it serve merely as testament to the caliber of my paper.

Acknowledgments:

I would like to thank the community of Guitar Center Berklee, namely the employees and staff, for their openness and cooperation throughout my research process. This article would not have been made possible without you.

Related Materials:

https://www.bbc.com/news/55017002

https://www.rutlandherald.com/features/vermont_arts/covid-19-pushing-vermont-music-stores-to-the-edge/article_c5de0724-3031-5f3a-911f-a89e0f8be5c8.html

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2020-07-09/music-business-streaming-covid-pandemic-nielsen-midyear-report

https://www.nbcrightnow.com/news/local-music-store-feels-effects-of-covid-19/article_594369d0-6be0-11ea-9513-ab6ca51e7c6d.html

https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/9362392/amoeba-music-record-stores-launch-gofundme

Works Cited:

Hissong, Samantha. “Sales of Instruments and Music Gear Are Soaring. Will Quarantine Spark a Renaissance?” Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, 24 Apr. 2020, www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/quarantine-diy-music-rennaissance-988394/.

Works Consulted:

Fulgoni, Gian M. “‘Omni-Channel’ Retail Insights and The Consumer's Path-to-Purchase.” The Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Advertising Research, 1 Dec. 2014, www.journalofadvertisingresearch.com/content/54/4/377.

Noguchi, Yuki. “Why Borders Failed While Barnes & Noble Survived.” NPR, NPR, 19 July 2011, www.npr.org/2011/07/19/138514209/why-borders-failed-while-barnes-and-noble-survived.

Zentner, Alejandro. “Online Sales, Internet Use, File Sharing, and the Decline of Retail Music Specialty Stores.” Information Economics and Policy, North-Holland, 15 Aug. 2008, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167624508000383.

Y. He, "Research on Online Teaching of Music Performance Based on Diversification and Intelligence –Take the Online Music Teaching during the COVID-19 as an Example," 2020 International Conference on E-Commerce and Internet Technology (ECIT), Zhangjiajie, China, 2020, pp. 193-196.

 

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