If Guitar Center is the only brick and mortar game in your town for buying music gear, keep in mind that their in-store prices tend to be significantly more expensive than many web stores. However, with a little effort you can work around that and still get a great price on gear you can physically check out.

This is because GC has a price-matching policy – any time within 30 days of your purchase if you find the same gear for less elsewhere they will refund the difference plus 10%. However, if you don’t want to make a 2nd trip back for that, do your research:

• If you know exactly what you want to buy, go first to the GC website and get their price, then search other sites for better (note that they only match legitimate authorized music gear sites, e.g. music123.com).
• Print out the web page showing the price including shipping (which they count for the total price) and URL.
• If you do not know exactly what you want to buy, GC usually has an in-store terminal where you can look up prices on websites and print them out once you decide on your gear. Alternately you can search on your smartphone and give the URL to the sales person.