When The Dam Breaks

Whenever business was particularly bad for a prolonged period of time, my brother, Danny, would point at the cars streaming up and down Mission Boulevard and say, “They won’t last forever! There going to have to buy something sometime. All we have to do is wait them out.”

And of course he was right. The market would inevitably turn, and the showroom would once again fill with customers. The mooches would resume their ritual of kicking tires and asking stupid questions. The salesmen would start the process of rooting out the buyers from the stokers. The automotive world would return to its rightful order. The only bummer was the trade-ins. They had all been driven into the ground, a veritable sea of $100 dollar cars. But the lesson of it all was that the business always comes back.

Always.

Now I will be the first to admit that I never envisioned a protracted automotive drought such as this one. In my wildest dreams I never imaged the five plus years of agony we have all gone through. And I’ll also admit that I can’t predict when this crap will end, but if I were a betting man I’d put down a hundred that we have another year of misery ahead of us. One more year of buying food off the dollar menu at McDonalds and drinking cheap beer. One more year of sales managers acting like dicks and dealers walking around with long faces.

Here’s a weird angle I bet you’ve never thought of: The quality of today’s cars has prolonged this drought. Forty years ago cars were about done at 80,000 miles, so the ability of The Others to hold out on us was limited. Today, most cars are just broken in at 80K. Even American built cars, dreaded by pipe smokers everywhere, can last well over 100,000 miles. So in a sense we are victims of our own quest for quality.

But I come here today with good news. When the automotive dam finally breaks it’s going to be like Noah’s flood. There is enough pent up demand for new metal in this county to make us all lots and lots of money. All we have to do is hold on--if we can. Young salesmen still have a chance to bail out of the business if things get too rough. Old Car Men like me have no choice but to wait. We were born to this business, and we don’t know how to do anything else.

The promise of tomorrow is that we will sell a helluva lot of cars. We’ll once again be able to throw the crazy people off the lot and concentrate on the buyers. The time will come when we’ll have the luxury of bitching about the low inventory and how upper management is flooding the floor with goof balls.

All well be as it was.

So get prepared. Get out your best rain gear. Because when the dam breaks we’re all going to get very, very wet.


Talk to you later,


David