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I swung by a local guitar shop, and they have 2 new unsold Squier Hello Kitties. One pink, one black. They want $250 for each. How reasonable/unreasonable is that?

Sounds unreasonable. Didn't they go for like, $150-200 new?

I'd say it's extremely unreasonable. They're on par with the squier affinity series, that's all they are, just in a different finish, with a different pickguard and pickup. Honeyiscool is going to come in here and tell me how wrong I am, but seriously you can pick up a good squier affinity if you look around hard enough for less than $100.

I was mostly curious. Those guitars have been hanging there since they were first released.

They mark them up because of the Hello Kitty Factor. I bought my daughter the Squier mini one and they retailed at almost $200. I got a deal on mine off CL, but they do tend to mark them up.

calling honey . . . beep


he's going to tell you the is too much but that they're worth every penny of that.

too much.... don't be lured by the kitty markup.

They sell for about £100-120 in the UK so I'd expect $150 tops in US$.

Heh.. I'll wait another year... when they're still hanging there, offer them $300 for the pair.

I like the bass they put out in that line...



Aen has/had one

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mkt3000 wrote:I swung by a local guitar shop, and they have 2 new unsold Squier Hello Kitties. One pink, one black. They want $250 for each. How reasonable/unreasonable is that?

I did a check of completed sales on ebay:

pink ones $290-$220

black ones $187-$175

They were like $149 new, I think. I got my first one at like $93 from eBay some years ago. I sold that one two years later for like $180, after I had fucked it up beyond repair, and it wasn't even a good guitar. I guess Hello Kitty is that big a deal. I learned how to do everything on that guitar, and it's where I picked up all the odd lessons like hmm, short scale necks won't intonate, hmm, Duncan Customs rule, hmm, you should use masking tape when you drill, hmm, you generally suck at modding. Sounded great, though, and I developed a soft spot for it, so I decided to take the pickup out and find a new vessel for it.

My second and third Hello Kitty guitars cost around $200, and they were much better than my first HK guitar, but $250 is probably outside of what I'd pay for one, unless they were fantastic examples of such or if they had the matching strap, gig bag, and/or picks, all of which are relatively hard to find these days. And then some guitars are unreasonably good guitars, like my black HK, which is my favorite guitar ever. No guitar plays like that guitar because it has specs that no other guitar has ever been made with.

But anyway, it's all supply and demand and so I guess $250 is a fair price to some, although if it's just hanging on the wall, you can haggle. Yeah, it's an Affinity, but it's a really unique example of one, plus the pink one has got pink dots on the neck. Needs better pickup to sound good, and a set of GraphTech saddles don't hurt, either. I always put concentric V/T knobs in mine, and they work great. Anyway, they're worth it to the right person but I get the feeling that guitar prices always are on the outer edge of what people think they should be, unless you're buying Daisy Rocks used, which for some reason, despite also being girl guitars, have no resale value whatsoever (I paid $200 for my Retro-H Deluxe WITH A CASE!). I guess that's the power of Hello Kitty.

And yadda yadda, let's not make it sound like I've said they're the greatest instruments in the world. Even if the black HK is my favorite guitar I have and the last guitar I would sell, I recognize that it's an anomaly. Also, notice the word favorite, it's merely my opinion of my own guitar. What I don't like is people bashing them for what I consider to be extremely unfair reasons when they're pretty good guitars and people then turn around and rave about their single pickup guitars and their pink guitars and their Squiers and blah blah blah, as if somehow putting them all together and slapping a Kitty on them makes it all of a sudden suck. So yeah, I end up defending them or talking them up a lot, but I don't think they're the greatest guitars in the world. Mustangs are.

I got a buddy who is an expert on Squier Hello Kitties, let me call him.

I got the 3/4 one for $100 on cl for my gf a few months ago

Gonna bump this one up... that same guitar shop is now listing them on their facebook page at $169... $169 for an NOS Hello Kitty is severely tempting me.

Well, so you want a single bridge humbucker guitar? If so, grab it. You could do a lot worse than a HK guitar whose resale value will probably always be decent.

honeyiscool wrote:Well, so you want a single bridge humbucker guitar? If so, grab it. You could do a lot worse than a HK guitar whose resale value will probably always be decent.

I already have a few of those... lol (333, Strat, Esquire, Musicmaster, DiPinto). But I could always use one more. I'm not gonna make a special trip for it though - if it's at the shop when I go down to San Juan next weekend, I'll buy it to see how I like it. You're right about the resale value - if I don't like it, I doubt I'd lose much money, if any, when I sell it.

Get it.