I Bought a Drum Set From Guitar Center - And Accidentally Modeled Their 2026 Store Closures
Guitar Center Store Closings in 2026 and Layoffs?
This wasn’t supposed to turn into research.
It was a few days before Christmas. My husband was a drummer in a previous life… and I decided to surprise him with a new drum kit from Guitar Center. Normal order. Normal checkout. Card charged immediately. Not pending. Not authorized. Captured.
Then I went to the store for pickup and they said I wasn’t verified. WHAT?
They wouldn’t release the order for pickup unless I called to “verify” the purchase. Not before checkout. Not during payment. After the money was already gone from my account.
That was the first moment my brain went, …oh.
Because if fraud prevention were the real concern, verification would happen before capture. You don’t take the money and then ask the customer to prove they’re real. That isn’t consumer protection. That’s merchant protection — from chargebacks, from fraud loss, from processor scrutiny, from whatever internal threshold has been crossed.
Still, whatever. Annoying but fine. I called the number in the email.
It routed to Boost Mobile.
Not Guitar Center. Boost Mobile.
I kid you not. If you had an email this holiday season for an Expert Gear Advisor - you may have that number in your email too.
Embarrassing doesn’t even cover it. This is the kind of thing you fix immediately if you’re operating normally. The kind of thing that lingers when customer experience has slipped down the priority stack. Apparently it is a ‘ whatever’ point- nobody I told on the phone or at the store cared. They laughed. How pissed off should the COO be right now? I just may reach out. I would want to know.
I tracked down the correct number, verified the order, and asked why this process existed at all.
They gave me the most corporate answer possible:
“It’s to protect our customers from purchases they didn’t make.”
Except they already took the money.
So I got ‘verified’ and I’m sitting in the parking lot waiting for them to bring the drum kit out to my car, and I do what I always do when something feels structurally wrong: I start pulling data - right there in the car. What was actually going on. I did a quick sweep of financials and leadership and it all started making sense. As soon as I got home I looked at the workforce and DAMN y’all!
What I found wasn’t subtle.