05-07-2013, 01:53 PM
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#27
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Administrator
Join Date: Nov 2007
Posts: 14,869
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DealerEx
I'm not familiar with the Idaho store, but reminded me of a guy I went through GM's Dealer Candidate School with back in 1983, by the name of Frank Halvorson from Jackson CA, a small town on the western edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains in the old gold rush country about 60 miles southwest of Lake Tahoe. They were the largest volume Chevy dealership in the US at that time, handling many, many thousands of fleet deliveries for companies all over the country, out of an old "middle of downtown" 1950's building in a town of less than 3,000 population. As I recall, Frank said they had 80 employees that did nothing but paperwork, make readies, and transport for the fleet deliveries. Haven't talked to him in years, and seeing this thread I googled his store and was saddened to see that he had been forced to close down in December of 2008 when GMAC pulled his floorplan after he was 16 days late on his "FACILITY" payment. He had given in to pressure from GM to build a big new branded dealership 20 months prior to the credit crunch. As you can imagine, such a business model (thousands of units, at $200-300 net per unit, required a massive amount of floorplan capital to function, and he was unable to obtain another source at that time. His brother David is still in business in a Chevy store in Modesto, CA and said he was able to survive because he was in an older building that was paid for.  |
Quote:
Originally Posted by steve_biegler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1nwJZtWpdU
Watch this and tell me there should not be outrage. DealerEx I had to look for and find this, it made me cry that Sunday morning. Little did I know I would be with him, without a dealership, less than 6 months later. 
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As soon as I watched the video that Steve linked I knew I remembered hearing about this dealership before. Here's a link to a thread on the forum discussing the closure of Prospect Motors back in December, 2008 - click here
I'll copy the above posts to the thread about Prospect Motors and continue the discussion there.
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