Uhh..... No He Doesn't.
You know things are getting tight with a company when they start even laying off fictional characters...... General Motors continues to slice and dice away at fixing it's company image. After lopping off 900 dealerships like a diseased left ear, GM announced that after 37 years, Mr. Goodwrench is getting his pink slip as well...
In an effort to be more like their successful competitors, GM is getting rid of the Goodwrench name. This also just in.... Parkay has just burned Mother Nature at the stake, Palmolive sent Madge to a nursing home, and Maytag stoned The Repairman to death....
Like most things carmakers do, it's more of a case of appearance than actual change. It will still be the same technicians and advisors at the dealership, so what will be different? Nothing at all, for better or worse. Maybe you'll feel better, and that's what really matters nowadays, right? GM's decided that the blanket GM service is bland and lacks power, so they will be instituting a 'Certified Chevrolet/Cadillac/Buick' label for their used cars. Cetrified Does at least sound better than Goodwrench Certified, doesn't it?
Their real hope is that The Change (sounds like menospause in a way) will bring more customers in for service, which is where dealerships really make their money - or are at least supposed to. Will it help? Our guess is that it will help used car sales a bit, but service may not change much. In our year and a half at Chevrolet dealers, we found Chevy people to be a worst case scenario: people who buy cheap, substandardly made cars, don't keep them up, then are stunned when they break... Yeah, if you can hardly afford a new car, servicing it is tough... but it's no accident that doing what we in the business tell you to do makes your car last longer. And you thought we were bullshitting you into that transmission service!
Here's the MSN article on it:
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/top-stocks/blog.aspx?post=99d09818-fbbe-4399-8e8a-2d42e0b84ce5
.
No comments:
Post a Comment