A glut of car dealerships

[mcdonaat]

Looking at my town today, we have All Star Automotive, which handles Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram, and Toyota-Scion. M&M Hyundai used to be Dodge, but that was closed back in 2009 as a Dodge dealership. We also have Walker, which has GMC-Buick-Honda-Mitsubishi-Kia-Mercedes-BMW, and Southern is Chevrolet-Cadillac. Ford and Lincoln are handled by Hixson, who also handles Mazda, and finally, Leglue handles Nissan - basically, we have every car brand you would find in a 50,000 person town, plus some (I still find it weird to have Mitsu, BMW, and Mercedes in a town this small).

However, looking back at an old newspaper from 1975, the car dealership system is very different.

Pontiac - Turpin
Dodge - M&M
Oldsmobile - Walker
Chevrolet/Chrysler - Southern
Ford - Robertson
Toyota - Hempen
Datsun - Burnett
Lincoln-Mercury - Don Wynn (later sold to John Decker, which also closed)
Volkswagen - Alexandria VW
AMC/Jeep - Quality
Buick/GMC - Leglue

Every brand was split up, and GM had not one, but four dealers. Competition was fierce!

Any other examples of dealers being split up back in the day? We don't even have a VW dealer anymore!

[txstateends]

There were numerous single-brand and weird-combo-brand dealerships in TX back in the day.  Now, it's not as much the case (sorry I don't have old newspapers or even phone books to quote from, but anyway, there were).  All the financial mess and brand cast-offs have caused many changes in attitude on the corporate level and the local level.

[SteveG1988]

My town has Lucas Chevrolet-Chrysler-Jeep-Dodge, Miller Ford-Lincoln-Subaru, Classic Nissan, we used to have Arrow Pontiac on the other side of town which was based out of an old A&P

[corco]

It really wasn't until 1990 or so that companies started merging all their makes into one dealer, and didn't really even reach fruition until '08 or so.

With Ford, Lincoln-Mercury dealers were always separate from Ford dealers, which is why Mercury sold a full line of cars- you can justify Mercury Tracers and Topazes to get people in the dealer.

With GM, the dealers were all separate, with GMC piggybacking on Pontiac or Oldsmobile or Buick if that dealer wanted to sell trucks too. In 1996 or so, Pontiac and GMC were merged as one division from a corporate standpoint.

Chrysler was weirder- to my knowledge (somebody correct me) they mostly always sold Chrysler-Plymouth at one dealer, and then Dodge at the other. Once they took over AMC, those dealers were converted to Jeep-Eagle, with Jeeps not appearing in Chrysler shops until after Eagle was phased out.

This is what led to ridiculous badge-engineering. Pontiac wanted to be able to sell the same cars as Chevy, and the brands more or less ended up competing with each other. Now that there's a bunch of foreign manufacturers on the scene, and only so much volume, it doesn't make sense to have Pontiac competing with Chevy anymore when Chevy-Pontiac needs to focus its resources to compete with Toyota.

Obviously with the Big Three, different makes represented different tiers, you'd trade up from your Chevy to a Pontiac to an Oldsmobile to a Buick to a Cadillac, but at the end of the day that ended up mostly being a bunch of hogwash, except at that very top tier.

[Duke87]

The town I grew up in (Stamford, CT) has not seen any consolidations that I am aware of in the past 20-some years.

That said, there have been changes.
The Jeep/Chrysler/Plymouth dealership is gone, it was demolished ~2007 to make way for an apartment building.
The Saturn dealership, obviously, is gone - it is now a Hyundai dealership.
The old Subaru dealership relocated to new, bigger premises back in the late 90s and its former site is now a Taco Bell.
There is now a Fiat dealership which is brand new.
The Nissan/Infiniti dealership closed after the crash in '08, but the site after sitting abandoned for a few years is now a Aston Martin/Lamborghini/Bugatti/Bentley/Fisker/Rolls Royce dealership. That's one way to bounce back, eh?

In town consistently throughout my lifetime there are dealerships for:
- Ford/Lincoln/Mercury
- Toyota
- Volkswagen
- Volvo
- Buick/GMC

Missing brands are largely represented in neighboring towns: Nissan/Infiniti, Honda, Chevrolet, Lexus, Audi, BMW, and Kia are all in Greenwich, Darien, and/or New Canaan.

[SteveG1988]

We have FC Kerbeck just outside of philly too. They sell GMC,Buick,Cadillac,Maserati, Lamborghini,Aston Martin, Rolls Royce, and Bentley.

[Takumi]

Most of the dealerships in my area have moved away from their old locations and now have other branches. For example, back when I was a child, the only dealership in town was Martin Toyota/Oldsmobile (I don't get that combination either). After Oldsmobile bit the dust, it was just Martin Toyota, then was bought out by the Priority dealer congolmerate and moved to its current location next to I-95 a few miles north, which also contains Priority Scion, Nissan, and Volkswagen. Next to them is Colonial Honda, which used to be in Petersburg, Colonial Kia, and Gateway Hyundai.

[corco]

Martin Toyota/Oldsmobile

That was common originally- surprised it lasted through the 90s though. When imports were first coming ashore, they were usually housed in domestic dealerships as those weird little cars that people could go see- a dealership might have 50 Cutlasses and then a Corolla sitting in the corner.

[SteveG1988]

Martin Toyota/Oldsmobile

That was common originally- surprised it lasted through the 90s though. When imports were first coming ashore, they were usually housed in domestic dealerships as those weird little cars that people could go see- a dealership might have 50 Cutlasses and then a Corolla sitting in the corner.

FC Kerbeck supposedly sold yugos along with cadillacs.

[Scott5114]

I found a link to a NPR Planet Money story a while back called Why Buying a Car Is So Awful. Long story short, thanks to state laws and generous contracts forced through by the dealerships, the car companies have little ability to close underperforming dealerships. So where it might make more sense to only have one dealership, instead we have two because both have been family O&O dealerships passed down from generation to generation for years and the manufacturer has no authority to merge or close one.

[DaBigE]

With Ford, Lincoln-Mercury dealers were always separate from Ford dealers, which is why Mercury sold a full line of cars- you can justify Mercury Tracers and Topazes to get people in the dealer.

Maybe always in your area, but (before Mercury was axed) I know of several dealerships that had Ford's three main brands under one roof and one that had a Ford-Mercury combo.

[kkt]

Obviously with the Big Three, different makes represented different tiers, you'd trade up from your Chevy to a Pontiac to an Oldsmobile to a Buick to a Cadillac, but at the end of the day that ended up mostly being a bunch of hogwash, except at that very top tier.

It's hogwash even at the top tier.  Back in the day, the 1940s and 1950s, Cadillac competed with Rolls Royce and Mercedes.  But by the 1970s, most of Cadillac's models were Chevies with 50 pounds of chrome added, and GM certainly didn't need five different nameplates anymore.

[Brandon]

Chrysler was weirder- to my knowledge (somebody correct me) they mostly always sold Chrysler-Plymouth at one dealer, and then Dodge at the other. Once they took over AMC, those dealers were converted to Jeep-Eagle, with Jeeps not appearing in Chrysler shops until after Eagle was phased out.

Chrysler originally had three sales channels:

Chrysler
DeSoto
Dodge

Plymouth could be paired with any one of these (and commonly was with all to provide a sales channel for low cost cars at all dealers).

Then, when DeSoto was axed in the 1960s, Plymouth was paired with Chrysler and Dodge dealers got "Plymouths" badged as Dodges.  When Chrysler bought AMC in the late 1980s, Jeep was kept as Jeep, and AMC was rebadged as Eagle.  Thus, they once again had three sales channels.  Eagle got the ax in the late 1990s, and the process of slowly combining the dealers started.

[formulanone]

The merging has been occurring for years, but those of non-related marques are being "split up" in many cases. A lot of this is because the manufacturers want similarities between the same brands, at risk of losing the franchise. And since 2000, we've lost Plymouth, Pontiac, Mercury, Saturn, Suzuki, Hummer, and Saab. Many GM and Pentastar dealers shuttered their doors and cleared their inventories.

We're also in the era of the large dealer groups; AutoNation, Group One, Sonic, and Asbury are major players that usually control smaller dealer groups...standalone family dealerships are less common, but they're still there because they're either well-established or too tiny for a bigger group to care about them.

While it's rather common now to see Ford and Lincoln together, or Chevy and Buick, it's becoming less common to see a theoretical "Nissan-Volvo" dealer, except in smaller cities. The old-fashioned "import dealer" doesn't really exist anymore, save a few really high-end exotic dealers that couldn't survive on selling two or three Lamborghinis a year.

It also appears like a lot of dealers because nobody wants them scattered around town, just as stores placed in zoned parcels for commercial or industrial use. Dealerships are noisy, have added traffic, and create lots of waste.

[SteveG1988]

When i was in grand forks ND (2008-late 2010) You had a Hyundai-Suzuki dealer and a Subaru-Kia dealer on opposite sides of the town.

[corco]

With Ford, Lincoln-Mercury dealers were always separate from Ford dealers, which is why Mercury sold a full line of cars- you can justify Mercury Tracers and Topazes to get people in the dealer.

Maybe always in your area, but (before Mercury was axed) I know of several dealerships that had Ford's three main brands under one roof and one that had a Ford-Mercury combo.

I certainly believe there were Ford-Lincoln-Mercury dealers, in fact I even remember some now that you mentioned it, but I'm very surprised at a Ford-Mercury dealer. Lincoln and Mercury were managed as one division after 1945, with Mercury as the lower end of Lincoln that allowed it the Lincoln-Mercury division to bring in enough people to stay afloat, as Lincoln couldn't sustain itself on its own. A Ford-Mercury dealer would have to be some prewar contractual relic.

[Takumi]

That was common originally- surprised it lasted through the 90s though. When imports were first coming ashore, they were usually housed in domestic dealerships as those weird little cars that people could go see- a dealership might have 50 Cutlasses and then a Corolla sitting in the corner.

That makes sense then. This dealership was owned by the Martin brothers for decades, maybe all the way back to when Toyotas first started appearing on the east coast. The younger brother is in his 90s.

[nexus73]

For the Coos Bay OR and Coos County area of 50 years ago we had multiple Ford and GM dealers.  Imports were well-represented with Volvo being paired with a Pontiac dealer in Coquille, Fiat being sold alongside GMC's in Coos Bay, Opels were dealt by the Pontiac-Buick dealer in Coos Bay and for standalones we had a VW and Datsun dealer.  In the Seventies Toyota, Mazda, Audi and Subaru would join the mix, either paired or alone.  MoPar just had the one dealer in downtown Coos Bay.

Today we have for the entire county one GM all-lines dealer, one Ford dealer who also sells Lincolns, one MoPar dealer and one Toyota dealer.  The cause of the disappearance for the others rests mostly on the head of one man who tried to build an empire of dealerships in Coos County and failed.  That took out a slew of domestic and import brands all over the county.  The Chevy dealer got the Pontiac-Buick-GMC dealer to turn over those lines to him.  A former Chevy dealer returned as the MoPar dealer.  The Nissan franchise went through two terrible owners and that poisoned the well in small town downstate Oregon enough to force their closure while the excellently run Toyota dealer has remodeled and expanded while drawing in customers from bigger cities inland due to competitive pricing.

Even the small towns here had franchised dealerships but no more.  Major brands were everywhere but now we have plenty of them missing, with 2 hour drives each way to get to them being in the cards for those who bought those makes.  That does no favors for someone needing dealership service so it obviously hampers sales of the missing brands.

The amount of used car lots has also declined substantially.  There used to be plenty that carried their own contract and sold beaters.  Now there is just one like that to go with one bigger higher end used car dealer, one medium sized higher end dealer and two small medium end dealers in the Coos Bay area.  Another used car lot acts as an add-on to the Toyota dealership while the former Pontiac-Buick GMC dealer has less than 10 used vehicles in inventory.  A tiny lot specializing in collectible cars operates down in Bandon and that is it for the rest of a county that was awash in used car lots back in the day.

Rick

[Pete from Boston]

Many, many smaller new car dealers in the Northeast -- mostly in-town places limited in size by lack of room or traffic -- got flushed out in the the post-2008-meltdown shakeup. 

Used-car lots in this area -- which tend to be small, corner-lot type places, are starting to vanish as development has started ramping back up in city neighborhoods.  I've seen three go in the past year in close proximity, and know more are on their way out.

[Mr. Matté]

Wilkins Hyundai and Subaru in Quahog, RI.

"At Wilkins Hyundai and Subaru, we have Hyundais and Subarus."

[mcdonaat]

The old John Decker Lincoln-Mercury has been bought out by Vaughn Automotive Group, as the used car wing of their group. They own Chrysler and GM dealerships in smaller towns south of Alexandria.

Growing up, Lecompte (a town about 10 miles south of Alexandria on US 71, famous for Lea's Lunchroom) had Red Shoe Chevrolet, which sold mostly trucks. That area is very agricultural, and trucks sold like hot items. However, after Red Shoe sold, Vaughn bought it about three years later and now sells Chevy vehicles again, mostly trucks. Another Chevy truck-only dealership is off of I-10 at Grosse Tete, which I never even knew existed, despite living about 15 miles from there.

Come to find out later, Leglue in Alexandria sold Jeep-Buick-Nissan. GMC was owned by Huffman Motors, which Walker took over. So, basically, you had a Pontiac-Isuzu, a Buick, a GMC-Olds-Saturn, and a Chevy-Cadillac. And that was GM only! Buick hooked up with Nissan and Jeep/Eagle, while GMC-Olds-Saturn hooked up with Mercedes/BMW/Mitsubishi.

In Leesville, you have Hixson Ford/Toyota... if that's not weird enough for you. Some small town dealerships have died off, while others have broadcasted like crazy over the radio. There's a billboard in Winnfield, headed east on US 84, that advertises Jay Mallard Ford-Lincoln, because if you head east to buy a car, you're probably going to Jena to Billy Wood Ford. Winnfield is home to P.K. Smith Buick-GMC-Chevy. It's hard to find a small town Cadillac dealer anymore...

[1995hoo]

Back in August 1988 my parents bought a Volvo 740 GLE (the first car I ever drove when I hit 15 years 8 months the following January) from Miller Toyota/Volvo in Manassas. It wasn't anywhere near our house, but a friend had praised that dealership (rightly so, as it turned out–outstanding service department). Later when the 740's radiator exploded on I-66 they ultimately bought a 1996 Volvo 850 there. They continued to get the car serviced there until the dealer lost the Volvo franchise sometime prior to 2010 (in January 2010 the car died on my mom on, of all roads, I-66 and they traded it in at a different dealer.....moral of the story, don't drive a Volvo on I-66!). It's now simply a Toyota dealer. I always found Volvo and Toyota to be a very odd combination, but on the other hand, as I look back I think it was brilliant: Someone young and starting out in the world could buy an econobox like a Corolla and then later, upon starting a family, could move up to a very safe family car from Volvo, but the same dealer would keep the business.

[DandyDan]

Then there's Nebraska City, NE, which has all 10 American brands from the Big 3 automakers all at Larson Motors and all basically in one giant parking lot.

[Desert Man]

I do know the Kia dealership in La Quinta CA closed in the last recession is now a Chevrolet and Cadillac combo. Some car dealerships in my area (the Inland Empire) are multi-company franchises, though most of them specialize in one brand: one sells only Fords, the other just Nissans, there's a Toyota and so on.

[PHLBOS]

The biggest change I remember regarding dealerships in eastern MA wasn't so much the number of them but how many wound up being owned by the same individual or company during the later years.

Some of that likely was a reaction to customers that were ticked off at one dealership and wound up not only going to another dealership but switched over to that dealership's car brand as well.  I knew many that went from a domestic brand to imports for that very reason back in a day.

Then, some of those dealerships that lost customers got smart and started buying out the other dealerships and started selling their brands in addition to their own brands.  In many ways, that was the reason why one would see an Olds dealer would be also selling Mazdas or why a Chrysler-Plymouth dealership would also be selling Toyotas as well.

They (the dealerships) didn't necessarily care what brand of new cars they were selling; they just wanted the customers.