Word: dealer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Chrysler and GM will force 2,000 car dealerships to close. This event has elicited a great many opinions from industry experts. The consensus is that the most damage to the car companies will come from the anxiety facing potential customers who may buy automobiles at these dealers and expect to have them serviced there. The car buyers will not want to drive long distances in order to find a dealer who sells the brand that they want. They will buy a Toyota (TM) or some other brand because they know that continued service is virtually assured. They...
...government and the two big U.S. car companies faced a balancing act between cutting the size and complexity of their distribution networks quickly or doing it in a more orderly fashion. Customers might have been encouraged to stay if the manufacturers offered special financing on cars owned by shuttered dealers. It would have been a good way to pick up or save a new car buyer. It would have created some goodwill. GM and Chrysler could also have introduced customers to dealers that are staying open in their part of the country. They could have offered a year's free...
...Chrysler did not make a single intelligent move as they told dealers that they would be closed. Customers and potential customers got to learn about what happened to the local GM or Chrysler franchise by reading it in the paper. The two manufacturers may have forgotten that many of the owners of dealerships are community business leaders in their hometowns. They may be a large part of the local tax base. They may go to church with the next twenty people who will buy cars in the town where the dealer is located. (See ten things you should know about...
...related move, GM announced on Friday that 500 dealers who handle Hummer, Saab and Saturn brands would be moved outside of GM's dealer network or terminated if a buyer for those nameplates cannot be found. Also on Friday, GM began notifying 1,100 GM dealers that their franchises will be terminated because they have failed to meet sales targets. Of GM's other 4,500 dealers, the automaker expects to cut 900, and it may use bankruptcy to get that done...
...relationship between The Big Three and its dealers was, for many years, symbiotic. There was some real balance between the products and marketing that came from the manufacturing and the sales and service that came from the dealer. That bond has been broken in an especially short period since approximately a third of the distributors of cars for Chrysler and GM will lose their franchises. It is the only financially expedient thing to do, but the government is, once again, encouraging an action that will put tens of thousands of taxpayers out of jobs. By placing the large car companies...