GM dealers are catching it from all directions. The General cutting back on leasing (with a very sharp knife) even as the troops wait for central command to fix the mix, And now the corporate mothership's gutting the dealers' GM Mark of Excellence 2008 Recognition Programs. A message to dealers outlined the "difficult" changes that resulted in canceling "select rewards" but added new cheaper incentives. Travel rewards are toast. In their stead: prepaid $1k debit cards and "exclusively yours®" reward points. "GM PerQs" are also gone, whatever the Hell they are. On the positive side, GM's cut the dealers' monthly enrollment fee by 50 percent. However, any refunds for prepaid feeds will "be applied to the Dealer's Open Account." Click here for a PDF of the complete communique. If a GM dealer or an industry-savvy member of our Best and Brightest can parse this for us, we'd be much obliged.
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The good news is they are keeping the trophies, plaques, desktop award chests and business cards! Woo hoo!
I like this part in the PDF: “shifts in consumer vehicle preferences”. Which equates to “We still build vehicles that no one wants and we don’t know WTF to do about it, so therefore we’re just gonna cut whatever we feel like”. (The shitty vehicles will continue to be built until morale inproves.)
GM, please die in your current form and come back as something that builds a limited number of vehicles that people actually want. Send all your current executives to some secluded island so they can continue their circle jerk club in privacy. The world has had enough of you and your eleventy billion models that are all the same.
@brettc:
Right on!!!!
I see a lot of salesmen polishing up their resumes and exiting the GM debacle. Eliminate the incentive to sell your product and they will eventually just quit selling your product.
I’m with brettc, just go away GM so something good can come from all the locked up talent and resources you are currently squandering.
The GM executive circle-jerk is the most apt description I’ve heard in months. Well done.
Does this apply to Canadian dealers too? There are two in this small area, crazy and overkill I would think eh?
makes sense under these difficult times. however, simultaneousy, there is something else that would make sense…bring ’em to Detroit instead. (see Return to Greatness)
brettc:
GM, please die in your current form and come back as something that builds a limited number of vehicles that people actually want. Send all your current executives to some secluded island so they can continue their circle jerk club in privacy. The world has had enough of you and your eleventy billion models that are all the same.
jpc0067 :
The GM executive circle-jerk is the most apt description I’ve heard in months. Well done.
Yes indeed! Just make sure you wear boots if you visit that island, though…
All crass joking aside, this is not getting better. It won’t be much longer now before salesmen and maybe dealers begin.. er.. “jumping ship.”
Okay, I’ll stop now.
When are they going ot start cutting executive perks? Flying coach, driving themselves in cars THEY purchased, paying for their own gas, cubical office spaces, no executive wash room, and I could go on and on. Who am I kidding hell hasn’t frozen over yet, the executives will be the last to give anything up.
Some prior posters have implied executive perks should be curtailed. Please let us not forget, GM is that largest car maker in the world. Building quality product, supporting a your dealer network, honoring the customer. Oh wait…this is GM. Never mind. First class or private jet will do fine.
I thought Toyota was now the largest car maker in the world…and their executives don’t have these perks.
Wonder why???
I don’t think these cuts are quite the end of the world. Certainly an eye raiser but not a jump ship type of thing.
For instance….
At Nissan I received enough sales points during a summer sales program to get a $700 Sony TV. A friend who’s a fleet manager at Nissan recently won a monthly contest and recieved $1000 in gift certs to a large department store retailer. Another friend who’s a sales manager at Kia won a LG plasma TV one month.
My point is, the programs, while nice to recieve, are not make or break for the people who work at the dealerships.
What one needs to know is if GM is changing volume/target bonuses at it’s stores. When it affects the dealer principles pocket you’ll see dealership level changes.
So as I understand a few of TTAC posters here can’t wait for GM to die?
Lets see,a couple of hundred thousand jobs gone,the North American economy goes deeper into recession.
But hey lets bring it on,that will teach the bastards for building and trying to sell an 81 Citation.
Here is a news flash,boys and girls:GM is still the number one vehicle company in the world.GM is not bankrupt,nor are they planning to go bankrupt.
So the dealers got to suck it up,and get by with less.Hey and guess what?Some of the dealers are not going to survive.Hmmm? GM has cut 40,000 hourly,and now salary guys are taking a beating.Dealers and salesmen are now sharing some the pain.Yeah,it sucks.
We are all feeling the pain, but when its all over GM will still be around,and they won’t need chapter 11 to get there.
10 bucks a share,jump on it while you can.
>>But hey lets bring it on,that will teach the bastards for building and trying to sell an 81 Citation.
If only that were the only. Let us not forget the Vegas, diesels, 8-6-4, and frankly just about everything GM has produced since 1970.
The products are a reflection of corporate culture and priorities – which in GM’s case indicates that mediocrity is the aspirational goal, inferiority the expectation, and crap “acceptable for production.”
Millions of us have experienced GM, and don’t want to again invest our hard earned money into a product that we have to be afraid of or, at best, find that we’re disappointed in as we live with it over the long term … discovering the that beancounters played post-warranty “gotcha” with us, and won.
Many of us are not rooting for GM to go under. We just don’t care if it does, and won’t feel that there will have been any injustice if it disappears – merely that it brought it upon itself, that the chickens of decades of crap design, engineering, assembly and overall quality finally came home to roost.
Like all large corporations the Executives will always have their snouts in the trough – God forbid they should lose some of their “hard earned” priveleges.
mikey I want GM to get the hell out of the way to make room for something new. Something not based on the robber baron era, like GM runs their business right now. I want a new era of American auto manufacturing to take it’s place. You have worked in the organization all your life you know the corperate culture is the problem, how can you possibly believe things are going to get better when the big problem isn’t even being addressed. I personally don’t think it can be fixed, the executives aren’t going to fire themselves and every bad apple that diseases that company.
I’m sorry that your in the firing line, and I have suggested repeated times to jump ship while the opportunity is good since I have had to go through a similar situation in the airline industry. Unfortunately we are all going to have to pay for GM’s problems, but avoiding them and propping them up doesn’t make the problem go away since GM IS THE PROBLEM. I would gladdly live through the major pain that is coming because of them to come out the other side smarter, stronger and with an organization American’s can trust and be proud of. GM’s collapse might be the greatest thing this country has seen in the last 50 years when everyone tied up in the mess gets set free to truely great things automotive or otherwise. Sometimes you just have to tare down the old to build something brand new. The steam era is the first thing that comes to mind but their are hundreds of examples.
And I wish it was an ’81 Citation, then it would be in the past. But no I trusted they had really changed, like they repeatedly said(a bout of major stupidity) and got a 2000 Cadillac DeVille thinking it’s the best they make this should be a shining example of the ‘new’ GM, boy was I wrong. That car is working out to be a $20,000 total loss, that got very little use by my family. The worst part is I’m not an isolated case, there are millions of people like me that have been badly hurt by GM’s wonderful corperate culture. What about the elderly people who bought the same model DeVille to find out the brake pedal pin falls out at highway speeds leaving you with no brakes then the airbag doesn’t deploy when you have the inevitable 70 mph crash, I guess they should be rooting for GM to survive also.
It’s not an attack on you, but I can’t in good conscience hold my tongue to this situation anymore. The rift it has created between my in-laws hasn’t been fun either, but I say what’s on my mind love it or hate it. You would be happy to know they bought 2 Impala’s, probably from your line, and the mother-in-law drives a Trailblazer that is starting to sh*t parts. All saying the same stuff as you, blindly following what they hear in the media, that GM is to big to fail.
Dealers, just like the executives you mention, are responsive to incentives. Well, cash, at least. Will people leave as we continue to pile on incentive programs that have less actual value for the recipient than the cash equivalent? It will be interesting to see. Sometimes getting an incentive is more compelling than the incentive itself…and some people play the lottery for the fun of rubbing a piece of paper. In both cases, folks are not motivated by a statistical reality.
This is in contrast to executives. Most are pathologically-incentivized at a personal level. I have already heard of several GM directors who have looked at the road ahead and jumped over into more profitable jobs outside of GM. There is little demonstration that a collective good is valued–it is every person grabbing as much as he can, however he can.
I am not sure what the solution is.
mikey if you were running the show at GM, I’d be right there with you. But, sadly, you’re not. Instead there is a team of scoundrels being overseen by a bigger set of jackasses who are ramming the ship into the ground as fast as they can.
GM is going Tango Uniform before 2010. Sell your shares now.
Redbarchetta, well played, sir. My parents were in the same boat on the DeVille, but with an ’01. They took up the lease from my late grandfather, and bought it off lease against better advice, only to have the engine piss off at 52k on the clock. It’s a known problem, a third party garage was able to diagnose it (head), and 3 local Caddy service centers failed to find it, fix it, or know about it, despite service bulletins. The dealer never could get the load leveling system right. or figure out why it ate a quart of oil every 2 months.
How about the ’03 Trailblazer that I bought with 0% financing and 10K in incentives in late ’02, only to barely make it out of ’05 with the damn thing. 3 Transmissions in 2 weeks, rust in the valve body that they couldn’t figure out at 2 different dealers, horrible brakes and rotors that warped at 8k mi, O2 sensor, faulty radio, faulty steering wheel integrated controls, faulty lift-gate arms, power steering lockup, thrice replaced tail-lights that shorted, 2 Ball joints, a control arm and a partridge in a pear tree. I’m lucky I got out of that piece of trash when I did, and still had $8k of + equity from my original $12k down. That was in 3 years of ownership under warranty. All told, I spent about 2 full months in those 3 years driving a loaner Oldsmobile that had sheet metal screws holding the interior door panel in place, which rattled on idle. I spent so much time going to the dealer before or after work that GM should have had me on payroll.
Mikey, I feel for you. I know what it’s like personally to be on a ship that could go down, as I got downsized last year from my job and took a year to find another comparable one- but the writing is on the wall. And GMs execs put it there, and they don’t care f**k-all for you, which should be apparent in their decisions.
I grew up in big caddy’s and olds, and loved them. I still look at 70’s caddy’s like “damn…that’s style”. but practically everything they were is long long gone. The bad taste in my mouth is from experience, and it appears, according to the forums I see, to be a common one. I have no sympathy for a person that makes their own problems, then has to deal with them (in general, not directed at you, mikey), and sure as hell have less sympathy than that for a company that does the same.