My Sweetwater experience may be different than many of you because I live just 3 hours away. I ALWAYS get my purchase the next day. I plan to take a day trip and go there sometime soon. If you are in Washington State you will likely not have that particular advantage, and I get that Sweetwater is just another store. I have recently purchased used gear from Guitar Center from a store in Virginia and from Musician's Friend from a store in Illinois, and the item arrived day 3 after the purchase. As long as none of that changes, I don't care WHO owns the places.

We just had a place that specialized in stringed instruments and school rentals be purchased by a larger company. That larger company changed the rental policy from monthly to 9 months at a time, in advance, and if the kid quits lessons there is no refund. Customers left in droves, and that location closed. 8 year old kids rarely have the attention span for violin lessons! But that's who they make their money. 9 months rental in advance, the kid quits after a month or two, and they rent that same violin out again while still collecting the balance from the original customer.

What is at the root of that level of store (and they are in more residential type areas) is simple. Every one of these "Why, when I was young..." posts contains some reference to "The old guy who worked at that place..." Well, that old guy continued to age at the same rate as we all did, and when the old guys die off they are replaced by someone young who learned music to mean "Buy parts on the internet, plug them into the DAW, and hit play."

I just did a show where the headliner was an ELO tribute band. Remember how ELO looked on stage with all those string players? This band had a girl playing violin, and she wasn't even in the PA. She was there for optics so the crowd saw a violin player when the string section tracks played from the laptop. Their show was 70% recorded. I do, always have, and always will, despise recorded tracks. I consider it glorified karaoke. The state of the business now is why I have 3 gigs left until I quit playing live music forever. I play tonight, Friday and once in November and then I am done with it. The level of hypocrisy I have seen in the last few years makes me both angry and sick to my stomach. The same people who 5 years ago complained because there were so many musicians sitting at home then put together "track bands" and became what they complained about. Trios with tracks. If you need keyboards and horns, hire keyboard and horn players. I miss BANDS. We are 10 pieces and all of our music is live. And when we opened for that ELO band, strangers found our Facebook page to tell us how we blew the ELO band away. And most of that sound comes from me. In the course of the night, from behind my keyboards, I play horns, organ, piano, strings, flute, rhythm guitar and backing "ooh" parts, often while playing tambourine with my other hand. But NEVER tracks.