Originally Posted by
ryanmattes
A long time ago, when I was a kid, I worked shipping and receiving for Guitar Center. We regularly got pallets of acoustic guitars with holes from the truck forks right through the side of the boxes, through 3 or 4 guitars. Boot prints on the boxes were common. We regularly made damage claims. The upside, and the whole reason I wanted to work there, was that I could buy anything that was even slightly damaged for store cost (after the damage claim). I had that job just long enough to get a Les Paul, a decent drum kit, a good set of congas, a PA system, and a number of other, smaller instruments, mics, and so on. I also had the job of separating the guitars that came in from their cases, cables, picks, strings, and everything else the manufacturer put in as part of the package, so the store could sell you all that stuff separately. I usually got to keep the cables, picks, strings, drumsticks, etc, so not a bad deal for a broke, working musician.
But the worst, the one that killed me, was the store transfer. We had a pair of 1951 Nocasters, of which fewer than 500 were ever made, shipped to the store. These are the original, pre-telecaster guitars, before he had named them telecaster, hand made by Leo Fender himself. And Guitar Center had two of them, one in near mint condition, and one that looked like it was fished out of a swamp. These things are truly irreplaceable, pieces of history, but they were insured for $250k each.
The boxes came in with tire tracks across them. The dirty one was fine after some TLC, no noticeable long term damage, but the mint condition one was broken in 3 places; twice across the body and the neck was snapped in half. I was horrified.
The shipper was UPS, by the way.
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