Exactly. They wouldn't do it if it wasn't beneficial to them. The cold hard truth is that from a retailer's point of view, "selling loans" is really nothing but selling things for more than they are worth.
The people who will be most attracted by their offers to let you live above your means are the very same people who are likely not to have a steady enough income and/or be responsible enough to make a payment on time every month. The people who can actually afford the stuff aren't going to consider in-house financing that often; they have their own credit lines, probably with an institution that they have a long relationship with, which offers fair interest with no hidden tricks or severe penalties for making mistakes.
GC doesn't want somebody with great credit to buy a $4000 guitar with 0% interest, make every payment on time, and end up with even better credit at the end of it. There are those who will do that, but those aren't the people that guitar center is banking on. They want someone with mediocre credit to buy a $1000-$2000 guitar, miss payments, void their 0% interest, incur ridiculous fees and interest, end up paying them twice what the guitar was worth when new, and have worse credit in the end. They make their money by keeping you in the hole, plain and simple.
You're almost always better off bringing your own financing into a purchase, even if it isn't 0%. The people behind these in-store credit lines are total snakes. And not to get to off-topic too much, but I believe that these sorts of in-house financing schemes have played a huge role in the loss of quality in American-made goods across the board over the past 30 to 40 years. That's because companies end up making more as lenders than they do as sellers of goods. Thus the focus on the products themselves wanes. It's one of the big issues that killed GM and Chrysler, and made their cars so crappy. Their operation became a predatory financing scheme first and foremost, with the cars existing only to serve the financing. The same goes for Guitar Center. Why would they ever bother inspecting, setting up, or returning flawed instruments to the manufacturers, when these issues don't affect Guitar Center's ability to sell loans, i.e. their ability to sell stuff for more than it is worth?
