Sales Drive

Now they’re sharing the wealth.

The company unveiled the GM employee discount program June 1, selling new GM vehicles for a percentage below factory invoices.

Area car dealers say the new marketing campaign has been a boon for business.

Miles Thompson, general sales manager of Thompson Pontiac-GMC-Cadillac-Saab in southeast Springfield, said the event has doubled June sales compared with June 2004.

“It’s going to be our second-biggest new car month since we moved to our new location,” Thompson said. “The only one that beats it is October of 2001, right after Sept. 11, when they came out with the zero percent (financing) for 60 months. We’re going to come close to doing what we did that month.”

Prices on the new vehicles range from $500 to $2,000 below the invoice price, according to Brent Hanks, sales manager at Dennis Hanks Chevrolet in Ozark.

“Anybody can buy the same way a GM employee would buy – someone in the plant, an executive with General Motors or someone who works for GMAC,” Hanks said.

The Thompson dealership sold 150 new vehicles for the month as of June 29. The company sold 180 vehicles in October 2001, for $5.9 million in sales.

While GM launched a nationwide marketing blitz to promote the program, area dealers are seeing the resulting customer awareness.

“People have been coming in asking us about it rather than us having to say, ‘Do you know about this program?’” said Hanks, who declined to disclose sales figures for the company during the sale, saying only that sales are up over the last few months.

The discount program comes in the wake of GM’s $1.1 billion first-quarter loss and a downgraded bond rating to junk status May 5. May sales were down 5 percent from the previous month due to slumping small car sales, the company said.

Furthermore, the Federal Reserve’s latest Beige Book, covering late April through early May, indicated that automotive sales in the 10th district, which includes Springfield and Kansas City, were flat since mid-April, weighed down by a continued decrease in sales of sport utility vehicles and large trucks.

The timing of the promotion, scheduled to end July 5, is not a coincidence. May and June are the two months when dealerships have the most inventory, and dealers need to move cars quickly in order to make room for the new year models released in August and September.

Thompson added that the summer months are when sales are usually best, because dealers offer more sales to try to move cars off the lot in preparation for the incoming new models.

Though the sale is scheduled to end this week, Thompson said there is always the possibility that it could be extended.

“It’ll be based on what national inventory levels are at the end of the month,” he said. “It really depends on inventory – the reason they came out with the deal was because inventory levels were really high, and they’ve really moved a lot of cars.”

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