Come on guys...

Less Dealerships+Less Models+Higher Prices = More profitable GM!

At least that's how GM does math anymore. Of course my take is GM will sell less cars and make less money because people just stop at that Toyota dealer now that is on the way to GM. Not to mention the fact that most people are smart enough not to buy a car you would have to take 40 miles for warranty service.

 

I wouldn't want to drive 40 miles for doing maintenance on my car, what is GM thinking!

There are also 2 Subaru dealerships but not 1 GM dealer? How screwed up does that sound?!

Even if they had sub-par customer service, GM needs to pick the best one of the four and at least keep that one.

Sometimes I think the people making the decisions at GM are just sabotaging things on purpose.

 

GM wants to be Honda...

Except with 4 brands, apparently. I honestly don't think they care that much about chasing volume anymore (Despite what whimsical Big Ed says) Cadillac, I could live with. But for Chevrolet (which is supposedly going to account for 70% of GM sales now) this is just ridiculous.

 

Look people. Just cause there are other dealerships closer doesn't mean that it's the wrong choice. How do we know the one you're passing on the way isn't the one that 40 miles from the one your going to?

Not to mention that the other companies will eventually run into the same problem GM had.

Also: Do you buy a car because you like the dealership? I hope not. You should buy a car because you like the car.

 

I know people who won't buy from an entire BRAND because of a BAD dealership experience, so I guess you could say that people do sometimes buy cars from a dealership they like...? They'll "sacrifice" a little on what they want in a car because they know if something goes wrong with it, the dealership will take good care of them. Sometimes the dealership experience is as important as how good the car is.

 

That is what I'm saying, if an area or city can support a brand as small as Subaru then there should be a Chevy dealer in that market.

Except that Chevy now has less dealers then Honda. The 4 counties that are the Albany area had 8 Chevy dealers, now we have 3. Toyota has 5 Honda has 5

 

It sure looks like the wrong choice if there were 4 dealers that managed to stay in business all these years and now there are NONE. It seems like the market was there otherwise these dealers would have closed long ago.

People DO care about the dealership. Many people care about the salespeople as well. I know so many people that keep buying from the same people and won't go anywhere else. Hell, I've seen people go buy Toyotas BECAUSE their sales person migrated from Saturn to Toyota.

If you were happy with a salesperson and the mechanics were competent and had a good relationship with that dealer, it's gonna be EXTREMELY tough to convince someone to drive 40 miles for service etc.

GM's process of selection of which dealers to close is obviously flawed.

 

I feel since GM was given this opportunity to thin out its dealer network and kill off some terrible dealerships, they may as well run with it. As long as in a few years they plan to start adding a dealership here and their to fill in key areas they abandonded.

Or maybe I'm hopeing too much that for once GM knows what its doing...

 

I'm family friends with the owners of the smallest Chevy dealer that is in my area. Probably one of the smallest in NY yet they were profitable even last year. Family business owned for ~40 years. Now I didn't expect them to stay open, but there are a few other spots in large population areas that I'm totally surprised by.

It is like they kept the biggest 2 and them picked the names out of a hat for who to close out of the next dozen.

 

2 dealers within 10 miles of me.


Just a thought if the best selling Hyundai dealer in the country is there, maybe sales were **** poor low with all the GM dealers. Here chevy dealers are high(the whole Nascar/biker/old retired american culture) And it appears our 2 will stay open.

 

Obviously flawed? Do you even know what the selection process was? I doubt it. No one seems to know for sure, so how can you say it was flawed?

 

You know that GM can't kill off the dealerships that people had the bad experiences at just because of those experiences, right? Maybe they used this once in a lifetime chance to kill off those dealerships that people had problems with?

Just cause they all may have sold an good enough number of cars to say afloat doesn't mean they were high profit, nice, or even good dealerships.

We don't know the selection process and until they come out and give a list of what they were looking for and what each dealership failed out we may never know.

 

By that same point, how can you say that it wasn't flawed??

We already know that GM was under a very limited timeframe. When rushed, often time some incorrect decisions are made.

Since 60-70% of the stores closed, were rural, it is pretty obvious what the main criteria was................ sales volume.

I live in a rural area, that has a Chrysler/GM store, and a Ford store. There is no other car dealership within 100 miles of us. Just what do you think the market penetration is, for brands other than those.............. in our area???

I will tell you what it is. Very low. For the most part, people rarely venture that over 100 miles, one way, to buy a brand that they cannot get serviced here. As a matter of fact, if you were to look at our area, you would swear that the Domestics still held over 75% of the market.

To be so arrogant, as to throw away the majority of the rural marketplace............ a marketplace that has been fiercely Domestic.......... is very short sighted.

Will it show today?? Probably not. But it will show.

 

It may indeed by flawed, but I can tell you this: With all the bull**** rules GM is required to follow as far as dealerships, etc. go, they are better having to reopen more later, than to not close enough now.

 

Again...I would not buy a car from a dealer that I had to drive 40 miles for service.