Dealership Tries to Buy Jeep During State Inspection

[Snowcavemike]

Haha, I don’t think it’s that special but

the dealership sure thought they could move it, recall and all.

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[Gladiator Brad 704]

Just another dealership trick. If you are dumb enough to accept their low ball offer they will make money when they resale your Jeep then make money on you when you buy a new one.

 

[bigrichva]

Everytime I take my truck into the local Virginia Delarship for the oil changes, tire rotations or any service related needs I usually get an email from their "online sales manager" wanting to know if I'd be interested in selling it "above market value" or the same line of wouldn't you like to get into something newer. I always tell them I'm not interested, then on the day of the service they text me the same thing. the last time I told them if they can get me the color I want, with all the options I want and that my payment remains exactly the same as I pay now and that my payoff will be the same as my current vehicle with the same if not lower interest rate and to be paid off when the current financing is scheduled to end I might be interested. He usually never responds back to that.

 

[Dryfly24]

Not to be obtuse but I really don’t see the point in getting wound up about any of that. It’s not personal. Dealerships make cold calls like that all the time to everybody. I look at it like getting junk mail in my spam folder. . .

 

[GOCAMPN]

Some of you know my story, LOL. Anyway my local dealership is a bunch of idiots, lost out on my sale when the JT first came out. Practically laughed in my face at my desired terms, I came back a couple hours later in a fresh Max Tow from a different dealer and walked past their desks to the parts department and picked up some floor mats just to rub it in.

I do get mailers, for both my JT and my wife's JLU. But the best is going back to this dealer on occasion, my mods are semi-subtle but I do have a ton done to it. I pull right up to the glass and see their heads turn. I was just there the other week, looking for some 2024 grilles on the lot and a manager fella came out to chat, told him what happened last time and he swallowed his tongue. ?

 

[mryanwing]

Told them they couldn’t afford it. That ended the conversation pretty quick.

 

[dajudge]

Every time I take in either of my vehicles they try to "buy" them from me.
Last time I had my 10 year old Impala in, there was a hand written and signed note with an actual amount on it laying on the drivers seat when I picked it up.

 

[Alpine Warthog]

I get an email from my dealership after every trip. If it's within the year ranges they're willing to keep on the lot, they'll give you a shout.

 

[punk'n]

I had an appointment at my dealership this morning. Last Friday, they sent an email asking me to call sales about their "XChange" program.

Today, after my appointment, I received another email asking that I call their sales department as their "Vehicle XChange provides special incentives to allow you to get a brand new car for pretty close to what you are paying today! "

I have 7,500 miles on it. I'm pretty sure they are just automated fishing emails.

 

[Wolf Island Diver]

Not to be obtuse but I really don’t see the point in getting wound up about any of that. It’s not personal. Dealerships make cold calls like that all the time to everybody. I look at it like getting junk mail in my spam folder. . .

Like I’ve said before I’ve got family that works in the car business. I have a much better understanding of the things they deal with, e.g terrible demanding customers, “get me done’s”, feast or famine income, etc than most people and I’m more sympathetic to their interests than most people. I’m not bothered by my dealership trying to buy my truck. There’s two things that bother me here.

First is the contrast between this behavior and overall lack of customer service. Since Covid, and we’re basically out of the pandemic operating environment at this point, it’s become increasingly difficult to get good customer service or sometimes service at all. This is both my observed experience at multiple dealerships and from the insider knowledge I have from people that work in the business. It’s become a fight simply to make an appointment at a car dealership for service. I haven’t been able to get any dealership on the phone and get a call back since 2020. It’s become a fight to get dealerships in Virginia to do timely state inspections required by law. I’ve had to involve Jeep corporate now several times to get a dealership to do the basic required maintenance on a vehicle as defined in the maintenance schedule. It’s in this context, when I’m struggling to get a state mandated inspection completed and I’m being told they may have to keep my vehicle for an indeterminate amount of time, that I am bothered by a sales person, becoming pushy and rude when I’m not willing to sell my truck at a loss to them. A truck that they are effectively holding hostage with with no estimate for completion of work that is required by law to be done on a walk in first priority basis the same day.


But there’s a much bigger issue here. Again, this comes from both my observations, following the industry as a whole and connections to insiders. If you look at the dealership consulting business, trade publications and the kinds of business trends talked about in the car business as a whole, and you can Google this, there’s a important and subtle change that has occurred in the last few years that has big ramifications for customers. Traditionally, service and sales had a fairly rigid line of demarcation separating them. They’re essentially two different businesses. In many cases they were or still are separate business units within a dealership network. But if you look at where the industry is going the big push is to make service part of the new car and used car sales profit generation; In other words for service and sales to work together to sell more cars.

Behavioral economics deals with how incentives drive behavior. It’s one of my interests. A world with no ethics and only incentives driving behavior is a dangerous
place. For example if the only reason people don’t commit crimes is fear of punishment and not some ingrained or learned sense of right and wrong, then we have a systemic and perhaps unsolvable problem. We live in a world driven by an algorithmic requirement to produce excess value. Consolidation, financialization and corporatization of businesses has created this state of affairs. It separates business decisions from the people that implement them. It reduces everything to a numbers game. It obscures accountability, and removes responsibility. It’s in this environment that we end up with a culture driven only by incentives, without any consideration of ethics, deleterious effects, or sustainability. It’s often said that corporations are psychopathic. This isn’t really intended as a judgment but rather as an observation that they operate algorithmically without any sense of positive and negative externalities or ethics. They operate to increase shareholder value. The only constraints on behavior to achieve that goal are regulations and torts. But that leaves a huge opening for unethical behavior. This actually explains a lot when it comes to the behavior of companies, vis-à-vis their customers and employees. We experience the effects in the form of deceptive marketing, low quality products, lack of repairability, the outsourcing of jobs, constant downward pressure on employees to produce more for lower wages, nonexistent or deceptive customer service, scam behavior and rent seeking permeating every market. It’s not enough to sell a product to a customer. You have to continuously sell some product or service to a customer that they will never actually own.

If when I enter the dealership for service and I’m not seen as a paying customer but rather as an opportunity to acquire additional stock, and recycle and resell a previously sold vehicle, what does this mean for the incentives to properly maintain my current vehicle? Market competition? Consolidation and sector wide coordination mean competition is increasingly becoming either nonexistent or a mirage. Almost all of the myriad of beer brands world wide are actually owned by 3 companies. All those different brands of personal products are owned by the same handful of companies. Big pharmaceutical companies also own almost all of the supplement and alternative medicine companies considered by so many people to be an alternative to “Big Pharma.“ More likely than not your so-called mom and Pop car dealership is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a larger dealership conglomeration and they also own the “competition” down the street. In this environment there are innumerable examples of how companies find ways to extract more value from existing customers. Entire business models are built on this.

The traditional business model for car dealerships was pretty simple; to sell cars to customers, and then gain their loyalty through good service. That’s not really the business model anymore. The new model is to extract value from customers in every phase of the relationship which includes a big push to move existing customers out of their current vehicles into new vehicles. Now, this isn’t new, obviously. What IS new is that the service department is expected to be a major player in this process and and it’s employees are now pressured and incentivized to help in this goal. Helping sales acquire your vehicle and get you into “something better” is now part of the their responsibility. They’re expected to funnel customers to the sales department. This represents a fundamental conflict of interest between a service departments stated function and its newly emerging function. What externalities are affected by this? Are service writers pressured to follow a script that downplays availability of warranty or repair options? Do they follow a script that encourages customers to cut their losses and get a new vehicle? Are they pressured to not provide timely information on the state of pending recalls? My dealership continues to state they know nothing about existing recalls. I’ve been directly told that technicians are directed not to perform any TSB on a vehicle unless asked by a customer AND that customer can demonstrate the issue. This is a position increasingly taken by many service departments now, supposedly to reduce their liability. Frequently a TSB deals with issues that a customer is experiencing but is unaware is a known problem or a problem that doesn’t manifest in symptoms until some future failure. The customer doesn’t know to ask. In past years, I have brought my vehicles in for service and had multiple problems fixed that I didn’t know about, or for which I didn’t know there was a known solution. And we’ve all experience the “cannot replicate” line that we get when we think there’s a problem. The obvious effect of this development is that problems on vehicles aren’t getting addressed. Are technicians pressured either indirectly or directly to do less complete, less thorough work beyond no longer automatically applying TSBs when they identify their applicability? It would be naïve to think that this can’t happen when the service department is short staffed, their pay is stagnating, they’re pressured to prioritize trade-ins and are expected to now somehow become a profit center for sales.

This isn’t hypothetical. It’s just recently been revealed that Tesla had a corporate policy to deny and delay any customers attempt to address battery life issues to cover up the fact that they’ve been overstating their ranges. This actually took the form, in many cases, of service departments simply deleting appointments, and then denying that the customer ever made one. This seems like a ludicrous way to operate for a service department; to simply gaslight its customers. But this actually was how they were operating given the pressure they were under by corporate. To see this is unique to Tesla is to not understand human nature, or tonight really believe that Tesla is unique in engaging in unscrupulous behavior. It’s in this context that I saw my interaction with the sales person as the symptom of a larger shift in the dealership industry and corporate behavior generally and this doesn’t bode well for customers.

 

[dmwphoto]

I think you are reading WAY more into this than is reality.

 

[Wolf Island Diver]

I think you are reading WAY more into this than is reality.

Which part is reading something into something? The service writers and technicians at my dealership both have complained to me about the pressure they’re under. They hate it. Family members that are senior mechanics tell me this is the worst time in history to be a technician. Old timers are leaving in droves. They can’t hire qualified people. They won’t pay new people wages that compete with Starbucks so they can’t get green people in that they can train. The policies are getting increasingly nutty. And now they have this pressure on them to help sales make their numbers. They hate being stuck between the angry customers and the policies.

I’ve discussed at length with family members, one of whom is a senior executive at one the largest dealership networks in the country about how things are changing for the worse. From their perspective the model is cut costs anyway you can while simultaneously increasing revenue anyway you can. But there’s no real cogent policy from management to make this miracle happen. It’s meant the codification of policies at major dealerships that used to be the stuff of fly-by-night used car lots. It’s meant unrelenting pressure on all staff to justify their job by being a profit center somehow. Beyond the fact that they have no reason to make this up, it’s talked about among dealership employees, and it’s being talked about in the press.

But this kind of thing rings true to me already. I remember working for a major defense contractor as an engineer and being told that every employee needed to put business development on their performance agreement which determines their yearly “merit raise” and to “always be selling” like that scene from Glengarry, Glen Ross. How does an engineer who works at a company with 1 customer and who’s product costs $13 billion, working down in the weeds on some system “sell more” ? It’s crazy stuff rolling down hill from the requirement to boost profit and the morons in management who blindly following it with no real ideas. It’s not a new story and it happens everywhere.

Again, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with a dealership trying to buy vehicles from customers and this isn’t the first time this has happened to me, especially since car shortages became the norm. The issue is this happening in an environment where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get work done by a service departments let alone quality or timely work. The question I was posing and discussion I was hoping stimulate by creating this thread in the first place is where does this go from here? Does this remain mostly just an annoyance or does it go somewhere darker? It’s already pretty bad when you can’t get a dealership to do the basic maintenance you’re paying for and have to change dealerships and then the new dealership can’t even do an oil change or state inspection without pushback and broken down vehicles. I’ve had 4 modern Jeep and service on this Gladiator has been markedly worse than any other car I’ve owned from the same dealerships.

I would encourage people to talk to their technicians and service writers and see what they think about this. When I take a interest in them and demonstrate some genuine empathy for their situation, rather than just complaining about the state of my repair, I get a lot from them about what they think about things. Doesn’t make me feel very good about where things are going. It helps that my Jeep dealership knows I know people in the business and they’re more inclined to tell me stuff.

 

[sharpsicle]

…holy cow…

Definitely didn’t see this coming. It was just an offer, I don’t think they were making a statement on society…..

 

[Wolf Island Diver]

…holy cow…

Definitely didn’t see this coming. It was just an offer, I don’t think they were making a statement on society…..

I never said they were making a statement on society. This has nothing to do with society. It has to do with how a particular business sector operates, how it’s changing for the worse, and how it’s similar story across a lot of businesses. I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial or unique insight. But they weren’t making a statement about that either.

However, later that afternoon the technician and my service writer made statements to me as they have before. And that is that they’re on a sinking ship. The dealership is now owned by some foreigners based out of Florida. My service writer rolled her eyes when I told her about the weird text conversation I had with “Kia” who works in some call center. “All they care about is getting your truck at a low ball price so they can resell it” she told me. I asked what that meant in terms of service. And she said “well as you can see, we don’t even have our own phones anymore. They monitor and record everything out of Florida. We can’t hire anyone because they won’t pay anyone. So we can’t get work done, but that’s not the priority in service anymore.”

This is/was the only Jeep dealership in Southeast Virginia that was worth a damn that did good service work. The rest were already scam places.

 

[mtudb24]

Happened to me back in 2014 with my 2010 Rubicon JKU. I was bullshitting with my salesman while I was having a oil change. The Service manager came into his cubical and asked if I wanted to sell it. I said everything is for sale for the right price. He shot me a price which was well above what I owed and thought it was worth even with all my mods. PIcked up a new Cherokee trailhawk the next day. RIght place. Right time and the right buyer anything can happen

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