Waiting for service

It should be obvious that I am not an expert in running an automobile dealership. The profession is far from my own vocation and requires a completely different set of skills and talents. About as close as I can come to knowing about the business is that my father, among several other business interests, owned and ran a farm machinery dealership for 25 years and sold vehicles during some of those years from the dealership. For a brief period of time he held a franchise for vehicles and sold new and used vehicles. One thing about my father’s way of selling farm machinery was that he saw the entire dealership as a complete enterprise, not a series of departments. He often said, our shop and parts department exist to support our sales. Without selling new and used equipment, we couldn’t afford the salaries of mechanics and parts managers. With out a good shop and parts department, we couldn’t sell machines. Service was key to his business. I remember plenty of late night runs to the shop to provide parts for a rancher who broke down and needed to have his equipment in the field the next day. I remember Sunday afternoon trips to pick up a disabled machine so that it would be first in line at the shop on Monday morning.

That was a long time ago. Times have changed. As near as I can figure, many of the vehicle dealerships in our town run their parts and service departments as stand alone businesses that set their own rates, pay their own staff and make their own profits. What I do know is that it is hard to get good service from a dealership repair shop these days. Yesterday I called a local dealership to schedule routine maintenance on my pickup. It is not broken down. The service that I need is routine preventive maintenance as specified in the owners manual. They couldn’t schedule the work for next week or the week following that. I had to accept an appointment three weeks out. In my case, I will be attending the Conference Annual Meeting in Omaha in those weeks, which means the truck will have another thousand miles on it before it gets to the shop. This won’t cause a big problem for me because I keep my truck well-maintained, but it is frustrating because I was unable to schedule the work for my day off and shuttling the vehicle to the shop will be a bit of a challenge on a busy work day.

I could try other service providers, but I know from experience that the shop I called is one of the best and most responsive dealerships of that brand in our area. The best shop can’t schedule routine maintenance in a reasonable amount of time.

I hope that the reason I’m scheduled out so far is that they maintain some space in their schedule for those who are truly broken down and need immediate service. Imagine if the vehicle wasn’t available and the shop put you off for weeks.

I already know the song and dance that I would get from the dealership if I spoke to one of the managers or owners. They would give me a long complaint about not being able to hire enough workers. They want their shop to be able to do more work, but they can’t hire the technicians and the technicians they do hire will leave to work elsewhere at the drop of a hat.

That is all probably true. I don’t know the dynamics of hiring labor. I do know that the dealership spent millions and millions of dollars building a new shop with a luxury waiting area for customers. I’ve sat alone in their service area waiting for my vehicle to be repaired. I have no need of mood lighting, multiple large-screen televisions, leather furniture and carpets in the waiting room. I’d be satisfied with more modest surroundings. The difference in the cost of the building itself would provide salaries for several employees. I also know that I have had conversations with two capable and well trained automobile technicians who moved from our state to our neighbor to the west because wages are so low in our area that they were having trouble supporting their families with what was paid.

Theoretically, in an open capitalist system supply and demand would kick in. The dealership experiences a shortage of technicians which forces them to pay higher wages to get technicians. That doesn’t seem to be operating in our area, however. The dealership experiences a shortage of technicians so they make their customers wait longer for service which makes their customers mad at the dealership, so the customers drive to larger cities to purchase their vehicles. The demand for service in the area remains high because there are many vehicles in the area, but sales go down, so the dealership is forced to raise prices. Yes, I had my pickup in an urban area during my sabbatical last summer. I had work performed on it. I know that the shop rates here are higher even though the wages paid to technicians are lower.

Again, I’m no expert, but I believe there is a good business in providing solid, reliable service in a timely manner. It wouldn’t take al luxury setting. One of the older, abandoned dealerships would have sufficient shop space. It wouldn’t be hard to hire technicians. A couple of dollars more per hour would make it easy to hire good labor from the existing dealerships. It shouldn’t be hard to manage scheduling. You could learn how many emergency hours to leave available each day and the average weekly demand for routine maintenance. You could learn which seasons are busiest and when the schedule would be lighter after just a few years in business. In my father’s shop, employees could earn bonus vacation hours to be taken during slack times of the year by working during the busiest seasons.

But I don’t run a repair shop. I’m a customer. And so I sit and complain. I even write about it. But I’m waiting for service that I should have been able to drive up to the dealership and obtain. And I’ll pay the shop rate when the pickup goes in for its service.

Then again, I’m not a customer for a new vehicle purchase. The price of new pickups is beyond my reach. I buy used vehicles and drive them for many years. No dealership will make much profit selling new vehicles to me. Maybe the customers with brand new vehicles don’t have to wait three weeks for service.

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!