I, for one. Unlike many of you, I am old enough to remember the crap guitars and amps sold by Sears thru their catalog... as well as mom & pop music stores which carried instruments even worse than those. Brand names like ZimGar with plywood bodies and necks that warped within a few months, utter junk compared to the $100 StratPak you find today at GC. The cheap Strat you get today will sound good enough and stay playable long enough for a truly interested youngster to decide whether he/she really wants to continue, without the instrument itself driving the kid away.
Back in the day, a lot depended on where you lived.
I grew up in Detroit, and there was always a huge professional music scene in town. Not only Motown, of course, but there was a big time jazz community, folks had big-band dance bands at parties, and there was a nascent, thriving rock and roll thing going on with my generation as well. There were several companies doing music for TV ads because of the car manufacturing ad agencies in town also.
The Detroit Symphony was a big thing, and the Detroit Opera Theater, and there were all-city bands and orchestras all over the place, with tons of venues to play live. There was also a thriving thing called "jams" where people would host teenage dances on the weekend that cost maybe a buck to get into, at very large venues! And there were high school dances, and, if you could pass for 18, frat parties in Detroit, Ann Arbor, and East Lansing at the three biggest schools (I had a hard time passing for 18 even when I was 30, but that's a different story!).
In 1965, when I was just a kid, our band used to get $500 for a party! To put that in perspective, a new Mustang cost $2495 in 1965. Every venue in Detroit was a Union gig.
The musicians got paid to play a bar, and if the bar stiffed them, the Union would send someone out to collect for the musicians.
Even Bar Mitzvahs and weddings would have live music, and often there was a dance band for the older generation, and a rock and roll band for the kids, who would alternate sets (and hate each others' music!).
If you had a band, and you got gigs, you got paid. No ifs, ands or buts. So teenage bands earned the dough to invest in some serious equipment. Venues didn't have PAs back then, the band brought theirs.
Thus, for the most part, the music stores in Detroit catered to working musicians who could afford to buy decent gear. And the stores carried not only guitars, amps and keyboards (that at the time were mainly combo organs, electric pianos, hammond or real pianos), they also carried wind, woodwind, and classical stringed instruments.
We had some great shops - Meyer's Music City was a gigantic place that sold every conceivable type of instrument, but there were good smaller shops like Massimino, Pontiac Music and Sound, and others that dotted the various neighborhoods, that sold quality gear. I bought my first PRS at Pontiac Music...a tiny shop that only had the good stuff.
I joined a working band and started gigging before I could drive, so I got to bypass the junky stuff from the start. I didn't know anyone in Detroit who gigged who was playing Silvertone or some of the junkier stuff.
I knew of it, but no one who was at all serious was playing it - even in high school!
The sad thing is that the market for musicians' services has shrunk to a tiny level with DJs and piped in music predominating. Today, when you say you play guitar, most people figure you're a hobbyist.
