For years Perfect Circuit and its endless sales/discount codes have had nasty effects on the retail sector of the boutique synth industry. Talk with any other retail shop and they’ll tell you their profit margins are already quite small. PC’s aggressive discounting + manufacturers selling more and more direct to consumers spell trouble-a-brewing for the big picture. Especially for indie builders and smaller shops. The synth market is not safe from the corporatization of America and abroad. PC on track to be the new synth-market-oligarchs of N America. Talk with the synth builders and they’ll tell you buyers are now conditioned to the holy discount code, which usually just inflates the base price… If you enjoy having a synth store near you, you should make a point to shop there instead of PC, at least once in a while.

I want to believe Perfect Circuit is far better managed

Same thing happened to a lot of people in Austin at SwitchedOn. So many vendors got burned and then they just closed the doors and ran.

Sounds like they kept good customer service until the end based on the Vlad’s post…

I was somewhat close to a lot of what happened here…. This is 100% the case. To an extent, both things can be true – it is hard to run a store like that now, but they had zero contingencies for anything changing – They were counting on “tech money” to keep things growing, and made bets that required that money to never stop growing. It was the sort of management you see from someone who has only ever seen favorable conditions.

I respect the vision they had of running community events and classes, but the vision far outpaced the reality – their space was also much larger than any synth shop could possibly justify, much larger than many all-in-one music shops that carried synths in addition to other instruments, and I am fairly sure that the expensive lease (that i imagine was not on the most favorable terms) is what made it impossible for them to bounce back.

Well managed businesses do not run gofundme campaigns like they did – if you are at the point where a for-profit business is soliciting donations just to service debt, its too late. At the end of it, they were selling used items on commission and using the proceeds of the entire sale — not just their cut, but the percentage that was to go to the original seller — to pay off debt, and paying the original seller in installments, if at all. That’s where poor management crossed over into actual malice… and I can speak confidently on that, because I was of those commission sellers, and I had to hound them like a collections agency.