Glad our dealers remain open (June 11)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
We were fortunate in Madera that none of our car dealerships wound up on the chopping block when Chrysler and General Motors decided to “save money” by closing some of their dealerships — in Chrysler’s case almost 25 percent of them.
That’s because, when you buy a car from a dealer, you don’t just buy the car — you buy the dealer who sold it to you.
That dealer agrees, explicitly and implicitly, to keep your rig on the road.
Dealerships aren’t just parking lots and showrooms full of cars. They also are big, expensively-equipped service agencies, the employees of which are supposed to have the skill to handle virtually any problem with your car once it has been on the highway a while.
It’s hard for me to see how Chrysler or General Motors will benefit by disenfranchising all those dealerships.
Most of those closed down were smaller operations that may not have moved that many cars. But it doesn’t seem like being small necessarily puts the automaker at risk. The capitalist at most dealerships is the person at risk — not the automaker, but the dealership’s owner, whether an individual or a partnership.
Dealerships may or may not bear the names of their owners, but the owners, especially in the smaller operations, are usually the ones who write the checks to the car manufacturers and banks, participate in their communities, make the payrolls, pay the taxes, and if they are lucky sock away a little profit at the end of the year.
The automakers may have certain covenants the dealers are required to fulfill, such as maintaining top-notch service departments, maintaining cleanliness on the premises and participating in promotional events. If dealers fail to fulfill those covenants, the automaker doesn’t have to go bankrupt to enforce them.
But it seems as though closing dealerships is just another way to sell fewer cars, not a way to save money or emerge from a bad economic patch.
