Life has been keeping me quite busy. Unfortunatly most of those things are things I can’t talk about publicly so that probably has contributed to me not writing. I am writing because I want to comment on this while it’s still fresh.
Fast forward from my last post to this weekend. I went shopping, twice. For 2 different things I went looking at cars which is a first for me. I have never actually shopped for a car and I can tell you what an experience it is. I know it won’t really shock you if I told you that I heavily researched the whole car buying process on the internet.
I went to test drive a car and my friend warned me ahead of time that afterwards you kinda have to give them a “thanks for ride goodnight kiss”. I already knew the MSRP of the car and the invoice price. I even had a quote from their internet sales dealer.
I drove the car around for a bit came back 20 minutes later and of course the sales guy was like blah blah blah. I said give me 2 things, 1 your contact information in case I want to contact you and 2 your BEST out of the door price.
So as predicted he went to talk to some manager guy and came back with a number 1k less than MSRP. I laughted at him and said I already have better than that from this same exact dealship. He asked I said some number and change and he quickly replies “if I can do that minus the change can we do this today?”
My thoughts here are sharp and to the point this IDIOT did not quite hear me the first time when I asked for his BEST price. See here I think the problem is that the whole car dealship practice has not yet conformed to a paradigm shift of internet/technology/business.
When there is a paradigm shift businesses need to change also or they will die. My good friend and role model Ben got into the computer business during the late 80’s early 90’s. During this time period computers were HOT. He built them and sold them as a distributer, business was good.
Come up to now if his business model was still the same he would likely be out of business and working for Microsoft or something else. That is not his story he shifted the focus of his business model and now is a service oriented seller with hardware on the side and is still doing well.
The second item I saw I happen to see while out with my brother at Target. I saw a eee pc 8.9 inch netbook for 329.99 . This stood out to me because the much much much superior model (recently released even) is around the same price but light years ahead of the model I saw. It’s on sale on Amazon.
In both cases if you are internet capable and shop around you’ll find the best deals around. I personally think that if I were to run a business the model would be slightly different than those of today. The only reason why you can’t completely abandon the old model is because there are still a ton of stupid people and even the savvy ones still have to hands on see the product. So far the car dealship I would only keep a couple of sales people, fire the rest and be very competitive against any dealers in the area.
Lata
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