Here is an email to me from one of my guys that buys for me, and for the past four decades, we have sold at the same auction. Rear this carefully and think about what is being said here, it couldn’t be crazier if it was a Salvador Dali painting…but it’s true.  Now keep in mind I have sold many hundreds of thousands of cars at the auction and sell more than anyone in the history of the automobile business including Galves and Grandfather Kelley combined times 100:

First off, as most of you know, I love competition and I love a nice fight.  But let’s dissect this.  Here we have a “salesperson” that is assuming I make money on the cars I buy from that store.  Next she is proving to be incredibly ignorant of what happens at an auction.  The assumption that a New Car dealer can do what we do, sell 30,000 units, $600,000,000 a year, over MMR with a 90% plus sales rate, is silly.  We have an infrastructure of over 150 people dedicated to one thing…the wholesale thing. It ain’t no accident that we are the only one in that  building or any other building doing what we do.  If it was humanly possible, everybody would be doing it, including her, her boss, her boss’s boss and her boss’s boss’s boss’s boss, and so on.  Also, she is overlooking that little fact that I am a bank.  A bank that fronts about $30,000,000 to dealers who like to get paid up front, 53 weeks a year (that includes the week when they are short on payroll so we front the cash to make to the next week now, on thespot, with a laser check), that works 100% of the time, no no-sales, auction fees, post-sale prevention wackiness, and finding out that that wholesale thing ain’t all it’s cracked up to be as it requires absolute dedication and knowledge to the point of insanity which eliminates her, her boss her boss’s boss, (and his boss who may not even know what an auction looks or smells like) and so on from competing with me in the street.  Next the numb skull is overlooking the fact that the dealer is a subscriber to our product, Trade In Marketplace, and is buying 20 units a week that he sells to us at a huge wholesale markup.

Just so history don’t get lost here, the reason that people come from far and near to an illogical place every week to buy cars is not because of anything other than us.  Please keep this straight.  We find them, fend off auction employees backstabbing us at the point of contact, buy them, we transport them, we recon them, we clean them, we kiss ass to get the titles, we sell them, we get crushed in a gaffing post-sale prevention, and you guys come to buy them, pay a wild fee (once to buy and then another to try to prevent the purchase), transport them, get told they are two seconds out of time so they have no recourse when there is a fart in the back seat.

And now here is the bad part.  They offer to use the information that I sold the car at their auction against me to the dealer that chose for the past 40 years to sell me cars.  It is completely without scruples, morals, ethics, principles, brains, vision, knowledge or any sense of honor.  If your number one customer, historically, nationally, is disrespected so openly, what does that say about character?  You do business in an open forum, and they are willing to take your data to use it against you?  Hoping to hurt you (not knowing it might help me as the stop is absolutely a loser YOY, but what would they know, or care evidently).

I am not talking for me.  I am talking for me and all the ME’s that look, act, talk, live, work, breathe and feel like me.  Free, Americans, hardworking, chance taking, driven to the point of a third divorce because of an eternal optimism that the average partner likes up front but hates over time, a car dealer.

It shouldn’t piss me off because we are frying major fish outside of the business we do in the street, but it does.  I think it is the ignorance or more than that it is the disrespect that they are willing to show us, the dealer, that makes a auction possible.  Tread on my poncho without concern?  I know one thing because I know me fairly well, I wouldn’t step on my poncho.  The one guy I don’t want to start with is the cat that has no regard for quitting.  You might be bigger, and prettier, and have muscles, and have more degrees than me, but you ain’t going to out think me, or out work me, or get me to quit cause it’s cold or I’m sore or it’s after dark, or a Holiday.  Or because you said so or because you think you have the right of way on a two way street.  Nope, miscalculation, you just going to wind my fat, old, been clocked five times ass up.

What do they think of us?  How could we, why should we think different of them?  What a pity.  Very disheartening, disappointing, embarrassing…and lights a fire in my ass that won’t let me sleep.

Founder and President

R. Hollenshead Auto Sales Inc.