As of my writing this, no other reviews are listed on Show Me Guitars' Yelp page. Fortunately for me, this means I have the honor of writing their inaugural review. Unfortunately for them, they just got done pissing me off.
For anyone who doesn't want to read the whole thing, here's the short story: I dropped my guitar off for routine work. This shop damaged my guitar, then played it off like the damage was a normal part of guitar repair. The employee berated me for being a fairly new guitar player, and refused to fix the damage. After a lot of discussion, he agreed to refund me my money without admitting any wrongdoing. If you are a new player, don't go here expecting support. If you're an experienced player, don't go here expecting even a below-average guitar store. In either case, your guitar might get damaged, and you might get yelled at.
For those who like a good rant:
I dropped my guitar, a Fender Stratocaster, off with Show Me Guitars around four weeks ago for some routine work. It needed a decent setup and had some sharp fret ends that needed filing. A week later, I returned to pick up the guitar and give everything a quick once-over before getting back to my day. However, instead of the clean, smooth frets that had been on the guitar for years, I now found deep grooves scratched in a straight line from the 8th to 12th frets under the B and E strings. My best guess (and this is only a guess, as the store will likely never admit what happened) is that when filing down the fret ends, the metal file slipped and hit the tops of several frets. Hold on, that explanation is far more than this case deserves. I don't care if the guys hand slipped or if a guitar scratching poltergeist took up residence in the attic--a guitar shop should always, at the very least, give me back a guitar in the same condition I left it. If they screwed up, they should make it right--and it seemed for a short time that they would. I pointed the scratches out, and the man working the front desk told me they'd fix it.
Two weeks later, I returned. The scratches were still there, just as shiny and new as I'd left them. In fact, I struggled to find evidence of any work having been done at all. When I pointed this out (to the same man working the front desk--remember him, he'll be back), he let out an exasperated sigh and told me to come back in a day.
Snap forward to today, two days later. I came back and again took the guitar out of its case to inspect it. The scratches were still there. Mildly shallower--at least they clearly made an effort to do some attempt at a repair--but still clearly deep enough to interfere with the guitars playability and sound when bending strings. I pointed this out to our friend, Desk Man, and received an unexpected reply: "Well, that's as good as you're gonna get."
No. No, it isn't. This isn't the best a luthier worth his salt can do, and this wasn't the level of service anyone should expect from any business. My pointing out the damage wasn't unreasonable or impolite, only the response that should be expected after someone damaged my instrument--that is to say, returning it to the condition in which they received it.
"How long have you been playing guitar?", he continued, to which I sighed, as by then I knew where he was taking this conversation.
"Well, I've been playing for twenty five years, so don't try to tell me about what a guitar should feel like," he boasted, at which point, he took the guitar, plugged it into an amp, and faced away from me while plucking out a few notes. "See, you don't know what you're talking about", he reiterated. Not having x-ray vision, I had no idea what strings or what frets he had played, so understandably that demonstration didn't assuage me as much as he expected.
For anyone new to guitars, I'm like a new driver who just blew a flat tire. I haven't been driving long, but I've been in and around cars long enough to know something's wrong. I dropped my sedan off at the shop some weeks ago, only to return to find it with no wheels. Then, the salesman, not the repair tech, tells me my wheel-less ride is "as good as I'm gonna get" and yells at me for not knowing what a car should look like.
I won't bore you with more details, but things did not improve from there. Eventually, he finally got the guitar tech on the phone (who I never had the pleasure of talking to directly in any of these visits), and after speaking to him, reluctantly agreed to a refund.
After leaving the store for, hopefully, the last time, I did notice two more things. First, the tech who had filed the frets had neglected to cover my pickups during the repair, and now my pole pieces were covered in metal filings. And, as if the potential damage to my pickups wasn't enough of a reminder of Show Me Guitars' level of service, I later checked the wad of bills Desk Man had given me as a refund.
He was five dollars short. read more
