Guitar Center reviews

Bad benefits, lack of career advancement opportunities, constant layoffs and reorganization by executives

The company is just so poorly managed from the top down. I lost count of how many new things were promised by corporate in order to streamline the lessons business and make my job significantly easier that simply never happened. The weekly conference calls make the poor management glaringly obvious - "good job you made number go up! everyone look at number and also make number go up! yay big number!" - That is pretty much the intelligence level you can expect from upper management. Aside from my part of the business, which improved dramatically because I was good at it, literally nothing else improved in the 2 years that I worked there. Note that if you have a degree in anything, no one will bat an eye. They do not value intelligence, only your ability to do grunt work, make numbers look good, and sell insurance plans and credit cards. It's just sad, Guitar Center wants to do it all--guitars, drums, keyboards, pro audio, DJ, production, lessons, repairs, rentals, used & vintage--but they will never be able to cover all these areas successfully as long as they keep cutting labor and offloading part time responsibilities to full time managers. Obviously the pay is laughable, this is retail so don't expect anything competitive. I was there for the experience, and I guess it was cool for a while. But whenever I talked to people with regular jobs, they were shocked at my workload and how stressed I was all the time.