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Anyone who’s ever done any serious shopping at a car dealership has almost certainly heard the above phrase from their slimeball salesman. The intent is to make you feel like Joe Salesman is looking out for you and your best interests, when in actuality he’s probably back joking around with other salesman about the guy he’s about to bend over on a trade-in.

You won’t hear it solely at car dealerships (I, in fact, have said this a couple times during my employment with a large electronics retailer; however, I was actually talking to the sales manager and actually trying to work on the price with my customers), but I mostly wanted to use it as a means to segue into my post topic.

As you may or may not know, I started taking guitar lessons a couple months ago. It’s really not going all that great since I haven’t spent much time practicing at home, but that’s beside the point. I’ve enjoyed it enough that I’ve started giving thought to getting a different guitar. “Why?” you ask? The guitar I have now is pretty nice, but it’s also not quite a full size model. My guitar teacher has told me that it will be easier for me to play on a full size guitar, and the music store where I take the lessons takes trade-ins, so I talked to the owner last night to find out what he could offer me, and was a bit surprised (I’m not sure why) to feel like I was buying a car.

The first thing he did was to look up the blue book (for guitars!) value of the model I have to see what that said it was worth. When he couldn’t find it, he looked for something similar and told me that since it was probably about $150 new, he could give me about $50 for it.

Cue sales pitch.

I was then told that that number would be dependent on what sort of guitar I was buying. “If you’re looking at something like an Alvarez back there [$700 guitar] I could give you $300 for it. If you’re looking at something like one of those cheaper Fenders [$200] then I can really only offer the fifty bucks.”

I told him I was just thinking about doing something in the next couple months and that I’d think about it. I’m not sure why I was so surprised by that, but I really was. I hate dealing with salespeople. It’s worth mentioning that I hated being a salesperson just as much, but I know what I hate about salespeople, so I made a big effort to not be “that guy.”