Hundreds of car dealers marched on Washington this week, hoping to build public support for a bill to block General Motors and Chrysler from closing about 3,300 dealerships.
These were family businesses, they said, mom-and-pop stores employing hundreds of thousands of Americans. And they were being asked to shoulder more than their share of pain in the restructuring of the auto industry.
An honest political observer would acknowledge that the bill has almost no chance of becoming law. The House version of the bill has broad support -- in fact, it has more co-sponsors than it needs votes for passage, but Senate approval is iffy, and the White House has signaled strongly that it has a veto ready.
Yet the continuing debate over the closings reminds us that the U.S. auto industry's distribution model is as antiquated as almost everything else about it -- including its union-driven overstaffing, its hidebound management and its reliance for profits on sales of gargantuan SUVs.
Would-be industry reformers have long held that the domestic manufacturers have too many dealers, especially compared with their Japanese rivals. GM started the year with about 6,100 dealers nationwide. That's more than four times as many as Toyota, even though GM's 19.6% market share this year is only a tad ahead of Toyota's 16%.
Consequently, one key directive issued to GM and Chrysler by Obama's automobile task force was to cut dealerships.
The companies took to this task with all the vim of Great White Hunters closing in on a herd of wildebeest. (There doesn't seem to be much love lost between the companies and dealers, which may be part of the problem.)
Chrysler issued shutdown orders to nearly 800 of its roughly 3,200 dealers, giving them a deadline of about three weeks. GM was more solicitous of its 1,400 rejects, allowing them until October 2010 to wind down operations -- though it won't sell them any new cars or parts for anything but warranty work in the interim. In California, the two companies are terminating 97 dealers between them.
Both manufacturers parrot the task force's position that overgrown dealer networks hurt their brand image and profitability -- which, oddly, amounts to the rather un-American argument that there's been too much competition in the marketplace.
