I've lived about 90 minutes from Sweetwater for the last 20+ years and never made it there in person. I've only shopped online with them. Last Friday my son had a baseball game that put us about halfway there. We decided we'd go on up after his game and check it out. It's a really neat store. It's like going to a mall but each store is different instrument section. After my son and I spend a couple hours checking out all the things and ogling over all the stuff we liked, I decided that a Squier CV 70's Thinline was coming home with us. They didn't have any on display at the time, so I found the guy working the area and had him round one up. After a bit he had one for me and off we went.
Once I got home, I started noticing some minor issues. Dent/nick in the neck near the thumb side around the 3 or 4th fret, a scrape where finish had rubbed off between the 7-9th frets (likely due to the cardboard packing material rubbing that spot during shipping from the factory), a rough spot about 3/4-inch long on the tapered edge of the pickguard between the bass side of the pickups, the jack cup was protruding out 1/4-inch and not flush to the body like it should be, a weird line under the finish on the treble side of the neck near the body about 3 inches long that looked like someone hit it with a marker and then finished over it, and some minor scratches on the pickguard after I peeled off the protective plastic. None of these were apparently obvious in the store as the lighting isn't that bright. I probably should have spent more time looking it over in the store, but by that point my wife and daughter were ready to leave pushing me to hurry up.
I went ahead and did a full setup on it Saturday afternoon thinking that the issues were mostly cosmetic and that once dialed in I'd forget it and get based the issues. It did play really well overall after a good setup, but something felt off. Sunday morning, I decided that I was going to return it and if they had a better one, I might do an exchange, but I was likely just going to return it. Made the trip back up Sunday mid-morning to return/exchange.
Once there I worked with a nice friendly young man and explained all the issues and he agreed that that new guitar should not have that many issues out of the box and was extremely apologetic and understanding of the situation. We looked through their inventory and I picked out another to try again. A short wait later he had the new one and it was a drastic improvement over the one I returned. Immediately I noticed that the neck finish was slightly different. The one I returned was a really dark tinted almost orange vintage tint. The replacement was more of a natural finish with some minor vintage tint. Another difference is that the first one was a 2022 made one and the second was made in 2021. I suspect that they've made some changes to their build process in the finish dept as online many of the others look to have the darker neck tint and some of them have darker natural bodies. I spent several minutes going over it to check for other minor and cosmetic issues and found none. Out of the box it was even setup pretty close to the action height I prefer. So, home the replacement went.
The only thing I had to adjust was the action of the low E, but otherwise everything was pretty dialed in.
The pics make the body finish look darker than it appears in person.
