Keeping the white flag flying

Wednesday 01 April 2009

Don’t get me wrong, I know better than most that there’s a recession on. I work for a large dealer group that has pretty much gone into hibernation as it tries to weather the storm, and thousands of my erstwhile car-sales colleagues are now looking at tiny bits of cardboard at their local ‘Jobcentre Plus’. What’s more, many more are likely to be signing on before the green shoots of recovery appear – quite possibly including myself.

But I’m also finding myself getting increasingly impatient with the fatalistic attitude to the downturn I’m finding at most levels of the motor industry. It’s seems that many people have just given up on even trying to flog cars – which is why we’re all here, after all.I recently had a very heated debate with the manager of a medium-sized showroom for a ‘mainstream’ brand. Like everywhere, sales had collapsed, but it also felt like morale had dropped somewhere below the level of the basement floor. For a start, there was dust on top of the piles of unwanted brochures in the showroom racks and the potted plants were starting to look crinkly. But far worse was the fact that I overheard one of the junior sales execs telling a bloke who was having a poke around a new car that the dealership “wasn’t offering any extra incentives at the moment.”

Don’t get me wrong, as a chap who spent most of three decades selling cars on the showroom floor I fully recognise the ‘recession chancer’ – a fantasist who walks in at the first sign of trouble and tries to get ten grand off the price of a new car on the grounds that “you’re not selling any of them anyway.” These guys are morons and – as every salesman (or woman) will agree, they should be dipped in the village pond and then hung in stocks.

But that’s very different from casually inviting a potential customer to sod off, as the junior sales bloke’s complete indifference was effectively doing. If I’d been in his shoes I would have been doing everything I could to make a deal happen – trying to get the best value for his part ex, seeing how low I could trim monthly payments – hell, I’d even have offered to come around and trim his hedges… But then, I grew up in the days when a junior salesman’s basic pay was so basic that it was sometimes non-existent. Back in the late ‘sixties and early ‘seventies we earned everything on commission and we were paid with cash at the end of the week. That meant – if I’d had a decent run – I could end up with more cash in my hand on a Friday night than any of my mates who had gone into ‘normal’ jobs. But the flipside was that, if cars weren’t selling or my luck wasn’t in, I might have to spend a week eating beans on toast and wondering where the next coin for the electricity meter was coming from. It was brutal, but a great way of encouraging you to go and sell cars. These days the minimum wage is underwriting the take-home pay of the junior sales guys, and although nobody wants to take home ‘basic’, you’re not going to starve to death if you do.

Anyway, it’s not just on the showroom floor that the white flags are flying. I was chatting to a casual acquaintance down the pub who said that he’d been having trouble buying himself a decent secondhand car. He wasn’t looking for anything flash – he’d been to see a couple of four year old Ford Focuses – but both private sellers seemed pretty much indifferent as to whether they actually did a deal or not.

One of the cars was dirty and full of kids’ toys, the other was blocked in by several other cars and my mate was told he “couldn’t take a test drive unless he was going to buy it.” Both sellers were unwilling to make any significant concessions on price, one as he’d been trying to sell the car for six months and he’d already reduced the asking by £500 (it was still about £500 over the odds) and the other because “nothing’s selling at the moment – so why should I take any less for it”.

Fortunately, there is one bit of the motor trade that isn’t going down without a fight. I was out driving with the missus a couple of weekends ago when I saw an old-fashioned secondhand car lot covered in bunting and with balloons flying – a big banner proclaiming that it was having a ‘Crunch Munch’. I was sufficiently intrigued to stop, as had lots of other people, where I discovered the proprietor had laid on a barbeque, some space heaters and an entertainer for the kids, with the adults getting their burgers accompanied with a side order of sales patter delivered by keen, well dressed professionals. The cars I could see seemed to be priced reasonably keenly for the crunch, most in the £4000-£8000 range and yes, a big sign assured us, credit was available. So there you go: keenly priced cars and good customer service. How about that for a radical recipe for success in the recession…