I'm trying to buy two cars right now, and this has put a big wrench in the process. The dealership can't tell me what's on their lot compared to what's on their Website, except by going out and searching.
How? Like, they order a certain number of cars from the dealership--do they just trickle in randomly? Do they forget to log sales? I get misplacing where the car is, but whether it is?
Granted, I have friends who work at rental-car companies, and the level of shitshow they aspire to is truly inspiring.
I told him, "okay, well if you do get any in, call me up so I can come over and buy one." Easiest sale ever. Well, that didn't happen, and my assumption is that they just don't know what they have from day to day.
It's merely a gimmick to get you in the door and convince you to buy something else. (And probably illegal, too.)
Happened to me the first time I went to buy a car. I just walked out and went to a different dealer.
Sure. And I get that some of the walking around is probably a ruse. But we're talking about their internal records.
And sometimes I swear it's just a glitch and they don't really care.
Me: "I want to buy one of the cars you advertised in the newspaper." (It was 2003)
Them: "We don't have those cars."
Me: "But you're advertising this sale."
Them: Poker face.
It wasn't like they said, "Oh, yeah, that was a popular sale and they sold out." It was very clear they advertised cars they didn't have so they could divert me to a more expensive model, and it wasn't like they offered to call another dealer to ask if they still had inventory.
I don't doubt that on a slow day a salesperson and the entire process will be slowed down... nothing like tapping into the sunk cost fallacy (as a buyer I spent 3 hours here today, I'm not walking out now and doing THIS again)!
Even in person, the people in the office would look at inventory on the computer but then have to send someone physically out into the lot to verify they did in fact have what "the system" said they have.
If the dealers have the capacity to go around and run everything by pencil and paper, it seems like either the are really poorly run for the average case where the computers work and make life easier, or the programmers have done a really poor writing useful programs.
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.
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.
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.