Well, the day finally arrived. It’s December 31, 2021, and you can pre-order a $1,099 Fender Strat made in Mexico. How do we feel about this?
I actually think it’s a mistake.
I think there may have been some very special models made in Mexico previously that came in at over a grand, but if so, they were highly specialized. This one looks more likely for widespread sales. A thousand dollars is still quite a lot of money. The PRS SE line has exceeded a thousand dollars a few times, too. But I keep thinking that a thousand dollar bare bones American Strat could be a huge seller, much like the PRS S2 Satin 24 was for PRS just a few years ago.
Prices usually have to go up. It’s been interesting to see different companies treating rising costs differently. PRS moved their SE line from South Korea to Indonesia so keep the SE line under a thousand dollars (mostly.). Fender basically did nothing except raise prices while adding small improvements. The budget friendly Squier Classic Vibe series, which was a fantastic deal at $300, is now up to $450, and it’s easy to see these prices continue to climb.
And yet when you look at inflation, none of this is unreasonable.
But when the regular standard Mexican Strat eventually goes over a thousand dollars, it will be in my opinion a sad day. Will we one day be talking up the Squier Bullet series as being a great value at only $300? At some point, this strategy might stop working for Fender. But we’ll see.
