Posted on 06/18/2011 8:22:54 AM PDT by SteveH
Are GM sales in the tank??
Is GM in big trouble??
I walked by a GM dealership today. A few months ago I had been checking out a Chevy Volt, and the dealership seemed a bit odd, but basically OK in appearance.
Now the dealership site is a mess. Evidently the lot went from being a new Chevy-GM dealership to a generic warranty pre-owned car lot.
There still is one Chevy Volt there. There are many pre-owned GM cars there along with the usual sprinkling of non GM used cars that one would normally expect.
What caught my eye is that a lot of new GM cars are sitting on the lot without their new car stickers, either ripped off or covered with other stickers. This includes Camaros, Tahoe SUVs, crossover SUVs, and even a couple of Corvettes. Many of the cars are darker, unpopular colors, but some are white. There is a truck canopy in front of the lot, but there are only GM compacts underneath the canopy. There are a couple of 2wd 4 door Silverados sitting further back in the front of the lot.
The sales building is evidently undergoing remodeling, and generally looks like a mess. It is not clear if the remodeling is continuing or has been abandoned.
The service department seems almost empty. Next door, the Honda service department of the Honda dealership is humming with activity.
This does not look normal to me at all. I have never seen such such disarray with a GM (or any other major brand name) dealership in the past. This would be the second GM dealership to go under in about 2 years, if appearances reflect a dealership loss.
I hang out with a somewhat savvy crowd and they shun GM cars.
What makes this scary is that I am scanning FR for GM news and I do not see a lot that signals big problems. Yet, new GM cars should not be hanging around a lot that lost its new dealership franchise... especially the Camaros IMHO... they should have been shuffled off to other new GM dealerships if my understanding of how dealerships normally work is correct. Market pressure would dictate that this happen.
Anyone know how well or poorly GM is doing? Perhaps I am just uninformed (possible since I have just returned from an overseas trip).
She went after them for something like changing the renewal date
of her service to the date of her renewal. That is, if the
service runs to the end of the month, and you renew today, the
service expires one year from today, not one year from the end
of the month, shafting you out of the days left on your original
purchase.
Maybe it was adding minutes. Something like that.
I can understand. I once had a credit card that would charge me the
yearly fee (early 1980s) 3 months in advance. And yes, I did
cancel the card.
Any way, the next time this woman went to use OnStar, them
diddling with the account had shut off the service. I'm
assuming they did charge her card for the renewal earlier.
He told me yesterday his mother was yet again on the warpath with
OnStar for some new charge for something she didn't
want/order/use.
I will never buy a GM car until it goes fully bankrupt and union contracts are broken. Obama does not count in his GM bailout numbers the $10 Billion in loss carryforwards that GM was allowed to keep after its restructuring, and the huge taxpayer funded tax credit that comes with every Volt.
I can’t believe the saps who bought GM stock! Even with all the sweetheart deals, GM is not run for the shareholders. It is run for the unions and the Democrat party. Who in their right mind would keep GM stock after the $4k bonus each employee received after GM just emerged from bankrupt, or when the CEO talked approvingly of the federal government increasing gas taxes by $1? Does anyone think GM will ever expand into non-union states? So why should shareholders keep the stock in this case?
They are if they wait for me to buy anything from them!
I will not contributed one dime to the UAW and that is who currently owns GM thanks to Obozo.
Why don’t you post the dealership name and location? Is it a secret or a story?
If you think On-Star is a nightmare, try cancelling XM or Sirius radio.
Thanks for chiming in, all three of you; it's worse than I thought.
-----
GM Could Be Free of Taxes for Years
General Motors Co. will drive away from its U.S.-government-financed restructuring with a final gift in its trunk: a tax break that could be worth as much as $45 billion......Usually, companies that undergo a significant change in ownership risk having major restrictions put on their tax benefits. The U.S. bailout of GM, in which the Treasury took a 61% stake in the company, ordinarily would have resulted in GM having such limits put on its tax benefits, according to tax experts......But the federal government, in a little-noticed ruling last year, decided that companies that received U.S. bailout money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program won't fall under that rule....
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704462704575590642149103202.html
Definitely.
how times change—about 2007 or so i said something similar about gm
and long-time posters were asking for me to be censored.
A relative cancelled his subscription but not after numerous offers to renew it. He said their final offer was $7. --$7 a month?-- I inquired. No, $7 a year. I want that deal when my subscription expires in September.
This is probably what’s going on at the dealership.
http://www.gmfacilityimage.com/buick_gmc/introduction.php
We have been GM folks for generations...personal and business and a lot of ‘em! NO MORE AND NO GOATS (Chystler). F O R D... On my way to replace a Cady with an Explorer.
One of the things that really pissed me off in the debate the other night was John King acting as though it was common knowledge that the GM takeover was a smashing success. Not one candidate on the stage bothered to ask him what alternate universe he was living in. No one challenged his assertions at all.
I had a hard enough time canceling one of my four receivers. They ended up sending me two new ones just in case I changed my mind.
How about when he says “Let me be clear”.
I would love to see a book of Obama-isms. It would be an interesting read.
Of course, the liberals would be outraged at the very concept of such a book. But, the rest of know that Obama creates gaffes all the time. Yes, Bush mangled the language, and all politicians create gaffes at times. But only Obama seems to be immune from the uproars which develop when a Republican says something stupid or taken out of context to make the Republican speaker look stupid.
My wife got stiffed for ~$20 by XM/Sirius and as a result, my son cancelled his subscription. Interestingly, the company will give NO email or written verification that you have cancelled, and my credit card company told me there was no way to stop them from charging my card if they wanted to. This bothered the bejeebers out of me, and I had to keep careful tabs on my charges for at least two months.
They pestered the house with calls for at least a month after my son cancelled, and each time the price got lower. We could have had the service for peanuts by the time they made their final “final offer”, but my wife’s experience with them in trying to get credit for the $20 they took killed the deal. We want nothing to do with them.
The health of the dealership really has little to do with the health of GM. My guess is that your dealer is one of the ones they closed down, and now the guy is just trying to sell off his old inventory.
I dug up the dealership on the internet and it turns out that the dealership moved to a new location a couple of blocks down the road. (The original dealership of ~2008 is an empty shell of a building in a different area of town.)
Still, to have that many new cars just sitting around at a pre-owned car lot does not relieve much of my original concern (as a taxpayer)...
The only GM dealership on the Big Island (Hawaii) closed down a while back. Not a huge market, to be sure, but few were buying their Guvment Motors crap................
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