Recent reforms have Guitar Center playing a new tune

Maybe Guitar Center should hire more girls to work in sales....possibly offer them some sort of a signing bonus to help attact them into the fray. The Fellas may be a little upset at first, but if you get a quality gal who really knows her stuff, they will have to respect her for sales ability, knowledge, and hopefully her ability to smooth out the rough edges that come with the territory of hardend sales floor.BTW... I don't know laura Taylor that well, only on a professional level...she's worked hard to get where she is...and she's earned my respect.

- ex employee

if they want to change the culture they should start off by paying their employees more. GC employees are a joke because they are exploited for their passions and knowledge and not payed enough for the sometimes 15+ hrs on the clock daily. GC corporate are to focused on the customer experience and not the most important thing; the employee experience. A happy employee is a productive employee. A happy employee is a happier customer.

FU GC corporate

Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is watching, Laura.FAIL.

Recently in las vegas all females found new jobs and quit after the district operations manager made an innappropriate comment about their "butt cracks" hanging out.This just added to the sexist and hostile-toward-females environment supported by the store manager. A young woman was moved into the store from oit of state and recently railroaded out of her position at this store as well.This article is NOT representative of las vegas operations at all.This is the stuff of lawsuits.

I'm 100% with Amber. The old "performance plan"... no matter how well you perform is a tool to simply set you up for firing, I went through the same exact thing. Top performer, but called out my district/store managers for their inability to behave in a professional manner, and I got the can. Its just how they do business, and the reap the "rewards" in who they are left with.

GC would rather stay in the stone age and attempt to bribe off female musicians than actually help out the ones they have working for them.I had a female employee repeatedly called a "cunt" by a store manager with nothing done. I've been chastised for hiring qualified retired musicians to work the front door instead of women that look like they are in between shifts on the stripper pole. I've had women come to me with complaints of discrimination when trying to move from a non sales to sales position and found myself backed against the wall for starting trouble. Laura has been part of the problem and this is a transparent attempt to pay off some needy organizations to get some sort of street cred. Its a weak attempt at best.

And it's poor reporting to not delve deeper into why a girls band camp, possibly a non profit, would actually TURN DOWN free money or gear from a music store. For something like that to happen shows the level of disgust out there... for good reason.THATS where the real story is at here.

On the plus side, life once you get out of a Guitar Center job is amazing. In the real world, people actually behave like human beings and you can actually make a decent living in a job that makes you feel good.

Women who want to have a real effect on the musical industry need to focus on being musicians, producers, musical educators, etc... Guitar Center is just plain old retail with a whole lotta overblown macho wannabe musicians. The Bro-speak alone is enough to make you wanna gag. Lots of short chubby dudes that can play one lick on the Custom Nocaster they bought, and have never had another job in their life that has put any real measure of performance on them. Its a bad environment for creativity and a worse environment for any hope of a professional career.Read between the lines of this article and look elsewhere ladies.

Laura Taylor is one of very few to make it to the top of this screwed up boy's club of a corporation. From my expierence you have to step on a lot of backs and faces to get there. Nothing in the article about the sexism the female employees are subject to. I worked for the company for six years. In fact one of the reasons they fired me for something I didn't do was because I made it clear that I was not ok with keeping my female employees who had been with me a year or more pay at minimum wage, but giving the new male employees I hired a dollar more an hour. They got sick of hearing me tell them how uncomfortable I was with that. Also they had cut back hours so much for my staff that as the Operations Manager, a salaried position that is a partnership with the store manager, was receiving 200 peice shipments by myself and boxing up heavy speakers and amps by myself. When I injured my back because of this and was put on doctor's restriction for my injuries my direct supervisor, the district manager sat me down at lunch to put me on a performance plan because during that month that they were making me work with my injury my performance took a dive. Well, what did they expect when I an restricted from bending over or from lifting over 15lbs. Included in the performance plan was a list of other things that were not true at all and no mention of where these out of the blue accusations came from. It was then that I realized that they had marked me for termination. I refused to sign and asked to be put on disability. I was on disability for a month and a half doing physical therapy for muscle spasms in my upper and lower back. Two weeks away from my doctor predicted recovery time my boss calls and begs me to come back early with the promise of extending the hours for my employees and complying with the doctors restriction as far as their expectations of me. I agreed, but when I returned there was no new hours, I was short an employee, and the stores operations had fallen into far worse shape then when I left. I managed to still raise the store back up enough to get honored a month later for best in district, and fired two weeks later for something I didn't even do, that if it was so important why did they wait a whole month to even mention it. This article is shaped and targeted to get women's money nothing more. I'd like to know more about the girls band camp who refused GC's reparations, I mean donation.

LOL. Laura has been singing this same song for years at GC. Lots of talk and smiles, She has done zero to help the female employees there. There are numerous nightmare stories I have either seen happen personally, or heard second hand from ladies who were discriminated against or verbally attacked at GC for being female. To hear the details would curl your hair.Laura got where she is by playing the good ol' boy game just like the rest of upper management at GC. Management at GC is notoriously bad, there is actually a website dedicated to talking about it.She has helped this kind of sexually discriminatory behavior by looking the other way numerous times. There were instances I reported that would have been grounds for immediate termination at any other organization, ones that would have made it to her desk, that nothing was done about.Funny. Its great that she is taking credit for the band camps for girls instead of actually attacking the issue head on within her own company and doing something about it.Its awesome that at least one band camp had the actual "honesty and integrity" GC preaches about to take a stand and see through this form of intellectual bribery of band camp buy outs for credibility amongst women musicians.When I worked for GC, I always saw her as one of the number one problems with the company. Someone the brosephs in charge could say "SEE, we have a girl up here, too"... one they seem to have a leash on and one that acts just as overly temperamental and reactionary behind the scene as the rest of the good ol boys. Meanwhile the ladies in the ranks struggle to try and come back to work on a day to day basis with no back up.Great work Laura... have a good sleep tonight... Go Bears, right?

I used to live in Las Vegas, and the G.C. there treated everybody with respect. The Colorado Springs Guitar Center treats everyone who isn't a headliner like poop!

You don't have to be female...Visiting the Tampa store recently,I finally went behind the counter and got my own strings.I have other things to do,and there were at least 3 guys standing around with zero other customers.

Guitar Crapper treats everyone poorly...and Im a male.

I'm a male and no one will assist me either. While I'm sure sexism exists in their stores, most locations just display poor customer service in general.

I'm glad to hear that they are taking notice. More and more of girls and women want to learn to play guitar. It's only a smart thing to do.