Wednesday

THE PLIGHT OF THE AUTO DEALER

Hundreds of new car dealers are folding across the country. Some forced out by the very companies that they made money for over decades. I wonder how it will shake out for guys like Roger Penske who has 98 dealerships or a guy I used to know in the Western U.S that had 173. Maybe they will be the only survivors.

YouTube.com has a video of from a Michigan car dealer showing the employees fighting after they had all lost their jobs.

Two employees of a Oklahoma dealership were arrested for stealing 56 cars from their employer and running them through several auctions. Sticking the money in their pockets, of course.

A Lamborghini dealer in California, whose sales accounted for about 5% of all Lamborghinis sold worldwide, has agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of felony wire fraud and faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison. He pocketed $8 million from proceeds that should have gone to Volkswagen Credit Inc. He sold 54 cars last October for about 1/3 less than he owed on them. Spread the money around trying to pay his other debts, so they say. Even if he gave the money to Volkswagen he would still owe them $4 million, he owed them $12 million.

We know that some dealerships stay in the family 40-50-60 years. Two brothers in Pennsylvania watched their third-generation business go belly-up. They owed the state and federal tax people over a million dollars and they couldn't get credit to replace their inventory. The outcome was this...one brother set fire to their remaining stock, had a heart attack and died at the scene of the burning cars and the other took his own life.

Now don't you feel better about the way your own life is going?