I'm trying to buy two cars right now, and this has put a big wrench in the process. The dealership can't tell me what's on their lot compared to what's on their Website, except by going out and searching.
Say it takes 5 minutes to manually enumerate all the features of a car. This seems more than generous. An intern can go through 12 cars per hour at this rate. This is a major inconvenience, but it doesn't sound like a thing that would completely disrupt business.
A smart intern would take photos of the window stickers, OCR them, put them in a Google drive folder, and salespeople could then search them. Could be done as fast as walking from car to car.
It started last Wednesday, and the estimate for the fix is “several days” according to the AP. I think it will be difficult even to get somebody hired in time.
Or maybe they should manually see what they have in inventory. Why is that such a difficult thing to do? The alternative is that they can sit around with their thumbs up their asses and not sell any cars "because the puter is down."
How? Like, they order a certain number of cars from the dealership--do they just trickle in randomly? Do they forget to log sales? I get misplacing where the car is, but whether it is?
Granted, I have friends who work at rental-car companies, and the level of shitshow they aspire to is truly inspiring.
I can verify that this happened to me last year. The dealer could not positively affirm that they did or did not have a particular model in their inventory, so the salesman and I wandered around the lot for ten minutes before deciding they did not.
I told him, "okay, well if you do get any in, call me up so I can come over and buy one." Easiest sale ever. Well, that didn't happen, and my assumption is that they just don't know what they have from day to day.
The thing is the car does probably exist somewhere - but it may be in their system, but allocated to someone (on paper only, because if they allocate it in the system it disappears from the website, but they want you to come in), or in transit (they appear on the website the moment the factory assigns a VIN build to the dealer, etc.
And sometimes I swear it's just a glitch and they don't really care.
In my case it wasn't that: The dealer straight up imagined a sale they wanted to have, and were quite rude to me.
Me: "I want to buy one of the cars you advertised in the newspaper." (It was 2003)
Them: "We don't have those cars."
Me: "But you're advertising this sale."
Them: Poker face.
It wasn't like they said, "Oh, yeah, that was a popular sale and they sold out." It was very clear they advertised cars they didn't have so they could divert me to a more expensive model, and it wasn't like they offered to call another dealer to ask if they still had inventory.
>And I get that some of the walking around is probably a ruse
I don't doubt that on a slow day a salesperson and the entire process will be slowed down... nothing like tapping into the sunk cost fallacy (as a buyer I spent 3 hours here today, I'm not walking out now and doing THIS again)!
It does. My last car buying purchase (2023) involved Internet research and then on multiple occasions on the call to the dealership I heard: "Oh we don't have THAT specific model on the lot but we have something similar".
Even in person, the people in the office would look at inventory on the computer but then have to send someone physically out into the lot to verify they did in fact have what "the system" said they have.
This is mostly a site for programmers. I can’t imagine working in computers and not believing at least that the intent is to make people’s lives more convenient and make work efficient.
If the dealers have the capacity to go around and run everything by pencil and paper, it seems like either the are really poorly run for the average case where the computers work and make life easier, or the programmers have done a really poor writing useful programs.
Let's assume you're only selling what's on the lot, and you're not running some complex network operation where you care about other dealerships' stock.
Googling tells me the average car salesman sells 8-10 cars per month. Maybe more for a 'high volume' dealership but certainly less than 1 car per day.
I would think the paperwork to sell a single car would take substantially less than 8 hours for an experienced worker to complete.
My last car purchase took 14 hours total. 2 separate days, was buying new, no trade-in. I tracked my time because it was a work week! Despite telling them after the first day to "have everything ready" for my second visit, I still spent the majority of the day inside the dealership, twiddling my thumbs.
It's a major tactic of car salesmen to delay the selling process repeatedly; it physically and mentally wears down the customer and they are more likely to accept aspects of a deal they don't like, to get it over with and completed.
It seems a lot of the process is slowed by "someone has to run to the registry" type stuff which has to be done in a specific order and during "normal" business hours. Typically the sales guy is eager to finish (just wants to sell his next car) but the paperwork is where things get really slow.
The entire time I was thinking how much of a "waste of time" this all was for the sales guy. He really didn't do much after the initial 2 hours of sales time, just "held our hands" while the paperwork was processed.
It'd be a pain at the multi-dealership-network level, sure.
But an individual dealership has what, 50 cars in stock? That seems easily manageable to me. I'm old enough that I've seen far larger operations running on paper.
Of course, the days of paper-based paperwork did require businesses to employ diligent and numerate clerks, and to have filing cabinets, manual calculators, photocopiers, whiteout, and suchlike. I suppose they could have run into some challenges around that sort of thing.
That would be a very small dealership around here, even in the suburbs. 50 cars on the lot was the amount I was seeing during the height of the pandemic supply chain problems and I was amazed at how empty the lots looked.
Yeah, I assume they had an assortment of clerks who’d be hard to replace right this moment, especially given that the duration of their employment would be like, what, a week or two? However long it’ll take to get this attack taken care of.
With all the intelligence built in to current cars, the salesman should be able to send a group text to the cars on the lot asking whether any of them has all or most of the desired features. And if so, what are its GPS coordinates. Or turn on it's emergency flashers and sound horn in five minutes.
