Pub. 58 2017-2018 Issue 2

29 WINTER 2017  DEALERSHIP OF TOMORROW — CONTINUED FROM PAGE 26 Call today! 800.934.8641 T E C H N I C I A N S S H OWR O OM E M P L O Y E E S O F F I C E S T A F F S E R V I C E WO R K E R S Make your company a stand out! With custom uniforms and services by UniFirst, you can enhance your brand image, motivate employees, and inspire customer confidence. You can also make your dealership shine with our facility service programs that include floorcare, restroom, and other ancillary business products. As a TADA member, you and your team will receive specially negotiated rates and initial order discounts ! So why not experience the UniFirst Difference for yourself? UniFirst—Your TADA Endorsed Uniform Supplier But there is a broader argument for a physical store that these cus- tomer, OEM, and dealer arguments don’t directly address, and that is about cost. It is not at all clear that a storeless system is inherently lower in cost than a store system: costs are not somuch reducedwhen the store is dismantled, as moved around. Cars are costlier to deliver one-by-one to homes than in batches to a dealership (where the customer does the work of taking the vehicle home, for free). Cars still need to be prepped for delivery. Trade-ins need to be examined and accepted (though online tools make remote appraisals easier every day). Inventories need to be held (see the BTO discussion below). Certainly there is enor- mous room to take costs out of the physical store (e.g. moving inventory from high- to low-cost real estate), but it is not that those costs just go away with a storeless car retailing system. This is because other storeless revolutions (e.g. replacing a record store with MP3 downloads, or a bookstore with ebook readers) fundamentally changed the way the product was delivered: with cars this does not happen. To illustrate, if the car delivered to your driveway by an Amazon drone isn’t quite right, the customer can’t just slap a UPS return label on it and have it go away. And here are a few final comments on the persistence of physical stores, from our research: • First, if you believe that sales will shift more to fleet from retail, perhaps as rideshare gains ground and thus a dealer is selling more to Lyft than to Jane Doe, then physical service facilities become even more crucial. If a retail customer has to wait a day for her car’s repair, she might be upset; if a fleet has towait, it has just lost a day’s revenue. And it ismy opinion that a fleet will not be happy with answers like “Just take the car to any garage to fix, and send us the bill.” Where Did the Tellers Go?