Er, wouldn’t that be “one every three days”? Even worse, then.
Dangit. I meant “less than three per week.”
<3 to you, too.
I had a roommate that sold cars for a time, so I have an inside take on this issue. He worked for several different dealerships over the years, Nissan, Mazda and Chevy. At his first job he received a training course that basically was “how to screw the customer 101”. Aside from the normal stuff about confusing the customer with so many variables in the deal, most of the time was spent on how to identify and exploit the psychological weaknesses in the customer. :eek:
I met a lot of his car salesman friends over the years, and to the last man I considered them to be sociopaths. Many were selling cars to support a drug habit. I met some folks that were salesmen for a giant RV dealer here in LA, and five or six of them shared a fleabag motel room, where they did crack cocaine after hours.
That salesman that seems so friendly in front of you will be laughing behind your back once the deal is done. I was shocked to see how these guys talk amongst themselves about you, the car buying public. “The guy was a dork, but I’d like to bang the wife.” “That (racist appellation) was so dumb I really reamed him on the rustproofing.” This brings me to another point. The business is RACIST and SEXIST. You are practically guaranteed to get a worse deal if you are female, black or Hispanic than if you are Asian. Asians are the most hated customers, because they always “grind” (negotiate) for a good price. “That gook ground me so much on the deal, I barely made any money.” And they hate the white people too, because most whites get a firm price on the internet these days and never talk to a salesman. The most admired salesmen are the ones that can screw the customer the most, and when someone goes “full pop” on a deal (pays sticker price) they are subject to ridicule once the customer drives off the lot, and it’s high fives all around.
Even so, I almost feel sorry for the salesman. My friend was a decent salesman, and the dealership exploited him in every way possible. The dealer would run contests for the salesman- first to sell a car this weekend gets a $100 bonus, first to sell five cars in a month gets $1000, etc. He almost always won those contests, but he never got paid. The dealer would tell him “we really appreciate your work, but you are already making more than the other salesmen, and we can’t pay you the promised bonus. You understand that it is merely a gimmick to get your lazy co-workers more motivated…” They would pull all kinds of other tricks on the salesmen, such as holding back commissions on stupid pretenses, claim deals didn’t go through that actually did, etc. The typical dealership has two or three salesmen that actually produce and can make a decent living, and a gaggle of others that barely make enough to buy booze, drugs, and split the motel bill.
Aside from that, the hours suck. How would you like a job where every other day your hours changed, and you never had the same day off? Welcome to the car business.
A good mechanic can always find work, and other office personnel have actual job skills besides what comes naturally to the sociopaths over in the sales departments, so they should be able to get a job without too much trouble. Not worried about them.
As for the owners, mostly they have already gotten rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Here in LA we have a very infamous guy named Cal Worthington, who was such a crook that Chrysler yanked his Dodge dealership. What that says about Ford, who allows him to operate to this day, I will leave to you to consider. The guy flys a private jet down from his ranch in Idaho or somewhere once a week to shoot the new commercial and pick up his bags of money. He works one day a week and is a bazillionaire. Screw the owners.
So, do I feel sorry for the dealerships? Nope.
This is a small hijack rant, but it’s *entirely possible *for more than 50% of a group to be above the average (mean). It is *not *possible for more than 50% of a group to be above the median.
For example, in a class of three students (A, B, and C), their respective scores are 1, 75, and 100, both B and C are above the average (~58.7). However, only one student, C, is above the median score of 75.
Yeah, I feel bad for them. I feel bad for anyone who loses their job, especially if there are people living with them who are dependent on their income. When we think about dealerships, it’s not just the salespeople who are affected, but also the ancillary employees like the mechanics, janitors, secretaries, etc.
Now, I don’t consider haggling antiquated. Without haggling, the market malfunctions. The problem is that most people only haggle with strangers over their car & their house, so they don’t know how to do it.
As for the auto dealers, they were in a ridiculous business. The Big 3 weren’t advancing the auto enough to out-compete their own aftermarket. And they left the actual advancements to other companies. If you’re selling nostalgia for technology that was new in 1957, & we can buy 40 years of production of the same kind of thing, what’s the point?
I’ve actually seen the paper with the study (I cited it in a paper) and there is no such trickery going on.
I feel bad for the administrative people laid off, but no worse than I do for all the people laid off in Silicon Valley thanks to Wall Street screwing up. The ripple effect works here also. The mechanics will do fine, since there is more demand to keep older cars running these days.
As for the managers and most salespeople, I’ve dealt with enough really pissed off because I could compute what a bad deal their complex offer is in my head, and enough who ignored my wife because women never buy RVs, and enough who ignored me since I didn’t drive up in the right type of car. Not to mention the manager who decided that I was supposed to buy the car he wanted to sell me, not the one he wanted. He did sell me a Saturn; too bad he was a Ford dealer.
If I go into Fry’s or Best Buy to buy a laptop, I don’t see the price listed as $2,000 for a $1,000 laptop, and no one tries to sell me an options package consisting of a hard disk and a USB port. They will try to sell me a warranty, but that’s about it.
I’m confused by what you mean by “trickery.” I’m simply talking about the difference between average (mean) and median. One of them (mean) may have more or less than 50% of the sample above or below it; one of them (median) will never have more than 50% above or 50% below it.
I have no doubt that the study is accurate–I was just going on a rant about people-in-the-world-at-large who don’t understand that an “average” doesn’t always fall in the middle of a sample in terms of how much of the population falls on either side of it.
I understand - it just doesn’t apply here. Here is a link to a writeup on the study, the most relevant result being:
So the issue isn’t that most drivers consider themselves better than most - it is just that hardly anyone thinks they are worse than most.
Actually, it *does *apply to how the study was originally referenced. Anne Neville characterized it as “more than 50[%] of drivers think they’re above average drivers,” whereas it would be more accurately explained as “more than 50% of drivers think they fall in the top half.”
What Stansaid. I sold cars for a year for Jack Fitzgerald, he has a mess of dealerships in the DC metro area. Today the Washington post has a story of him calling all his buddies in Congress tying to save his lying butt.
Nothing but just desserts, I say. eleven dealerships he has. He is going to loose seven of them. Cue Nelson Muntz!
Jack Fitzgerald is back in the news. He is asking for Big Government to protect him from Big Government.
Frankly, I am loving this.
http://www.fredericknewspost.com/sections/news/displayUpdate.htm?StoryID=91216
I am developing a very unChristian attitude towards these people.
They are on C-SPAN right now crying over their lost fortunes. They are crying that they have been minting money for three generations. They are saying they have a passion for cars. They are crying the factory screwed them over.
Heck with them.
It is UnAmerican they say!
What’s wierd is: Our local section of Americana had a King Soopers (local big regional chain) close in one section (I’ll bet the local population couldn’t support two in a 4 mile area)…then Albertsons closed (replaced by a Whole Foods like grocery store), Then Target (I suspect it became the super Target a mile or so away), Now the Chrysler dealer’s empty, and I suspect the Chevy Dealership will too. Originally, we had a smaller Ford and smaller Chevy dealership in one block, owned by the same family, the plan was to move the Chevy dealership down a block and the Ford dealership would take over the whole block. Now the Chevy dealership is just going away.
So on the surface, it looks like a lot of different places are closing, in reality, a percentage ARE going away, and others are migrating to better handle the local population…except:
We have four or five HUGE buildings, some that were local mall anchors, that are now empty and most likely REMAIN that way. We have two Dealerships, one that doesn’t look like it’ll be refilled any time soon, and three big anchor storefronts empty (more if extend your net to the local mall, where CompUSA and Linens and Things are gone.