Douglas Korthof

The Most Significant Green Shoot Starts to Wilt

100,000 jobs lost at dealers -- well, those are not value-added, are they?

GM's overhead, from incompetent, overpaid losers like Wagoner and Lutz to fat margins for bloated dealers, is their big problem; and it arose from a culture of neglect, arrogance and animosity toward the customer and their own workers.

100,000 jobs at dealers -- another way to look at this, all those guys lounging around in cowboy hats waiting for suckers to wander by and be conned into buying a gas guzzler -- means $10 BILLIION savings (at $100,000 total cost per person fired, including burden and allocation, etc.).

Lean car dealers do it with less persons, lower margins, and more cars sold per square foot of floor space. Because, unlike GM, they have cars that people want to buy, and because companies like Toyota pay attention to customer requests.

GM jailed its own customers for trying to buy the EV1 (and failure to disperse, blocking the sidewalk, and so on); think of that!! What company survives by jailing its cash customers and refusing to sell their product??

Now if they would only decrease the money wasted on big display ads, expensive real estate (someone pays the mortgage on all that prime real estate on which the GM gas-guzzlers and chrysler monster-mobiles sit!) and other waste, fraud or abuse.