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"One of the 10 least pleasurable things you can do is go out and buy a car," says Ford vice president Tom Wagner, who heads the automaker's customer-satisfaction operations. Chrysler sales vice president Tom Pappert agrees: "We have got to get away from intimidation. Even for people who don't mind shopping and bargain hunting, it's the distrust factor that causes the heartburn."
Each of the Big Three has begun taking steps to try to improve its dealers' sales-floor behavior. This spring Ford sent out a list of directions on how to treat the buying public, including such steps as "customers courteously acknowledged within two minutes of arrival," "test drive offered to all customers," and "advisory relationship established by knowledgeable sales consultant who listens to customers, identifies needs and ensures needs are met." Chrysler offers financial incentives; to earn the highest $300 factory payment on each unit, a Chrysler dealer must rate in the 95th percentile or better on Chrysler's internal customer-satisfaction index. General Motors has initiated a ground-breaking project in California for the training -- or retraining -- of its sales force; the company also gathers some of its most important dealers for round-table discussions and pep talks, usually led by one of their own who, like Don Flow, has seen the light.
For if honesty is to break out across U.S. showrooms, it will have to do so as a grass-roots movement. There is only so much muscle the Big Three can apply to change its dealers' ways. To own one of the 23,000 dealerships in the U.S. is to be a member of a clannish, well-to-do and often fiercely independent society. Dealerships are regularly traded or sold among friends or in-laws; 40% of them at present were inherited from a family member. Oldsmobile general manager John Rock, who is the son of a Chevrolet dealer and whose wife is the daughter of a Buick dealer, notes half jokingly, "Most of our dealers seem to come from the same sperm bank."
Some see signs of change within this tight circle. Mark Rikess, 45, once ran his family Chevrolet dealerships in Minnesota and now heads a Los Angeles consulting firm that advises other dealers on ways to improve their selling practices. He has noticed that his clients tend to fall into the same pattern: second- or third-generation owners, college educated, between 35 and 45. "They want to change," Rikess says, "not because they are going to see a financial advantage today. They just don't want to run the business the way that Daddy ran it."
If this trend continues, somebody will have to tell the salespeople, the ones who deal with customers face-to-face. To help this process along, Oldsmobile has opened a $25 million "Vision Center" in a nondescript industrial park outside Detroit. Inside, the facility resembles a movie sound stage, with flowing spaces and a spiffy, glass-walled showroom of the future. Large framed printed slogans (OLDSMOBILE'S FUTURE IS IN THE HANDS OF OUR CUSTOMERS) hang on the walls.