My 5th grader wanted to start trombone, so I signed up for a local music store instrument trial purchase. Cost: 25 to sign up, and it would be free for three months. After that they would charge my CC 35/mo until they reached the total of 904.46. So... after making sure my son actually like to play trombone, I bought one using the local craisglist (we met at the music store for inspection) and cancelled by trial.
My Cost: 365 (signup fee + trombone) vs 929.46 -> Savings of 564.46.
Heck - where I worked back in college, the rental would have cost around the same, you could have done exactly what you did and bought a used trombone from the very same store for around $300 as well. Rental program is a cash cow because most people don't think beyond "what do I have to spend today to walk out of here with a horn". Anyone who spent more than 5 minutes looking around the store first would be like "I think I'll just buy one of those $300 ones right there."
Save money in the future - make sure kid doesn't sit around tapping the end of the slide into the floor. Eventually, enough flattening will happen that it has to be fixed, and it is tempting to do because there is usually a rubber bumper on the end and there's a lot of sitting around not doing much in band rehearsal.
I know right? When I first read the terms of the trial/rent I was puzzled: "How on earth can the music store make any money out of this deal?". But then I realized that many parents would simply not bother to look for a used one because "is just 35/mo"!
Thanks for the pro-tip! I'll let my kid know for sure.
It is an interesting business model. You might pay ~$300-400 for a brand new instrument from a reputable manufacturer, and you're going to sell this thing to a family who is going to give it to a child for $25 / month. They can return it at any time, they can swap it for another instrument at any time, they can trade it in towards an upgraded instrument at any point in the future, they can ask you to fix it for free unless in all but the worst cases of intentional damage. If you couldn't stretch those payments out for 3-4 years minimum, there's no way this would work at all. So the keys are
1) make life as easy as you can for the band director - you have someone visit them at school at least weekly and deliver anything the program needs at near or sometimes below cost. Helps if this person is an ex-band director themselves.
2) those returned instruments - you have to fix them and clean them, but you can do that pretty cheap - then you rent em again to next years crop at a slightly lower purchase price or rent
3) when the instrument gets banged up enough that its hard to charge a "nearly-new" price, you sell them for around what you paid for them years ago.
4) don't make the availability of item 3 obvious to most people - engage them at their school and not the store if at all possible.
5) Here's one the store learned while I was working there - don't incentivize your sales staff to sell the $300 used stuff before the rentals. Seriously - we were on commission and there was a small fee we'd earn to go through the lengthy rental process and send a customer on their way. But we'd be paid 10 times that for selling a used horn, and it was a much simpler transaction for us - I know my go-to move was "well, you know the rental program is great and I'm happy to help you with that if you want, but I've got this trumpet over here I can give you a deal on and you'd break even in a year or so . . ."
Basically, the whole thing is really hard to get started, but once that machine is humming, a good rental program just spews out money. Not that it can't come crashing down - losing market share can be a real problem, so you've got to stay on top of what your competitors are doing and make changes when needed.
* - not the standard professional instruments generally speaking, but mid-grade. That was always fun when someone misunderstood or had been lied to about that and wanted to upgrade to a Bach Strad or similar and you had to say "we can't do that - we can sell you the trumpet, and we have 6 months same as cash financing available, but we don't rent those . . ." Actually far, far cheaper to just buy those than anything similar to the rental program, but always a tense conversation with someone who expected this to be a zero-cost trip to the store and it turns out that to get what they want is a 4-figure trip to the music store.