Used to be a great company - Anonymous employee Guitar Center Employee Review

1.0
9 Dec 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The employee discount is pretty good at 10% above standard cost on items. The GAIN program also allows employees to purchase gear directly from vendors usually at a lower cost than employee pricing. The general culture of lower level employees is also pretty good, as I have made some of my best friends working here.

Cons

Where to start? Low pay, even after you have moved up the chain a couple of links. Local HR is a joke with HR staff that you can tell hate their jobs, and the quality of work they do shows. Directors and Managers who don't listen to their staff and keep pushing sales concepts that they themselves cannot do, or never have done. To put it bluntly, it is a boys club the further you move up, and you are not promoted by the hard work you put in, but more by who they like better. A CEO who has directly admitted that he only takes on jobs like this for 2 years to fix the problems, and then moves on.

Explore other reviews about Guitar Center

5.0
16 Jul 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Management takes good care of you

Cons

No complaints that I can think of

1.0
21 Apr 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Plenty of capable individual contributors doing real work. - The brand and the business itself are legitimate — the problems are organizational.

Cons

- Senior leadership is politically driven rather than outcome-driven. Strategic initiatives stall out, and leaders spend more energy assigning or shifting blame than actually diagnosing and fixing problems. - Some parts of the org operate on deference to the top. Honest assessments get softened into whatever narrative leadership wants to hear, which makes real cross-functional work difficult. - Senior leaders do not consistently advocate for their own teams. When things get political, self-preservation takes precedence over backing the people underneath, and capable managers end up exposed.

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