State of Economy – Car Dealers Shutting Down

Here’s an interesting article on CNN.com’s site that I almost had for MyTradersJournal.com.  It’s written by a friend of the family who works at CNN, Paul Varian.  He sent me his story via email and said that he was sending it to the AC/360 team also in case they were interested.  He gave me permission to post his story if CNN wasn’t interested.  They were and posted it, so I’m just linking to it instead of posting a duplicate.

I’ve been talking to him for the past few weeks about what kind of new car he should get.  He’s been thinking of getting a new car for months and finally his car’s engine started acting up.  He took it to the shop, got it “fixed” only to have another problem hit.  He took it back and got the run-around about when they’d have it ready for him.  Eventually, after not receiving a returned call from his mechanic, he was in the area and decided to drop by only to find the gates chained and bolted.  That was last week.  I talked to him yesterday and he got his car back, not fixed.  Looking for a silver lining I have to remind him that at least he is buying a car at a time when dealers will be willing to cut a great deal to unload some inventory.

His blog post on AC/360 is worth the short read.  It’s such a great example of the state of our economy.  It’s interesting to see how a car dealership can go under in the same town where technology jobs are still being hired at a premium for good candidates.  We’ve noticed a slow down in our IT recruiting this month, but not too much considering the headlines we’re seeing for other industries.