Greetings Fender Players.
First of all, i'd like to say sorry for my English (Thats not my primary language).
I live in Russia, St Petersburg and its pretty hard to buy a good Guitar(Especially made in USA) in our guitar shops. Only one distributor of Fender here. The worst thing is prices, for example:
Fender Highway 1 Precision bass - 1700$ - (Latest pricelist says its 1230$ )
Fender Standard Jazz Bass - 1200$ (830$ - pricelist)
Same to all other Fender guitars and basses.
Never saw American Standard series or any USA made basses there.
I had to make an order in Estonia to buy my Fender American Standard Precision bass, coz we don't have any of them here!

Ain't it too high?

Thanks for reading.

You are in the ballpark. Don't forget Fender has to ship it all the way up there and your retailer has to make some money on it.

If you are that much of a fan it might be worth taking a trip to the US. Just come off season when the flights are cheap.

You are always welcome here

I have some internet friends in New Zealand and they complain of exactly the same thing but for them it's not a shipping issue. They have begun to order their MIA Fenders online. I've even been asked to shop for some of them and have gladly done so. I find a good looking piece of gear with good vibe and feel and email them the store info and guitar serial number. Stores will ship too. It's a great excuse for me to go shopping on someone else's dime. Even after paying high shipping rates to New Zealand they still save hundreds of dollars. It's an unfortunate side affect of a free enterprise market. Dealers offshore will gouge for no other reason than because they can. I can only imagine what it must be like in Russia.

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Just think of how awesome a guitar player you could have been by now if you had only spent the last 10 years practicing instead of obsessing over pickups and roasted maple necks.

Joe Its all down to inflation mate. Russia is still very new to western democracy and participating in that market. As soon as the western world see's Russia's mineral reserves there will be something silly like 5 us$ to the Ruble. Still a very beautiful but guarded land you live in mate.

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No no and no

With that kind of discrepancy, you could make a very nice living going back and forth bringing back Hwy 1's to sell. Even with close import controls, just ship an empty multi-guitar case. Then bring it back with it very lightly used guitars (not new as you don't want any one to get suspicious). Think about it ... you could make three trips a month, each time bringing back three guitars -- each of which you could profit $1000 on. That's $9000 per month pure profit ...

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Laughing out loud with fear and hope, I have a desperate plan ...

Hi Joe_Crane, welcome to the Forum.

These people are in Germany. Their prices are not the lowest - but much lower than the ones you mentioned:

http://www.thomann.de/gb/index.html

They are one of the biggest online sellers out there: perfectly reliable. Though they don't seem to have a Russian language version of their site I believe they do ship to Russia. There was a Russian gentleman on this Forum last year who bought stuff from them.

Have a look, anyway...

Cheers - C

I have a good friend who owns a guitar shop in St. Paul MN - Capitol Guitar. He sells new and used equipment on Ebay and ships internationally. I do know that he has shipped to Eastern Europe and Russia. It sounds like an on-line purchase may be worth looking into.

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I Can't Explain

Thanks for your answers and ideas, helped me a lot.