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.
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.