[tomkarlo]

Car dealerships are apparently still pretty primitive in terms of inventory management - which I guess is unsurprising given that they're mostly small businesses. NPR recently did a piece on one of the top Jeep dealerships on Long Island and they had issues like selling the same car twice, or selling a car that was no longer on the lot, because they were literally using a whiteboard to track what had been sold (and even more informal methods for tracking cars that had been "put on hold".)

[apayan]

I think you're referencing an episode of This American Life. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/513/1...

It was a very informative episode, and did a great job highlighting the financial difficulties faced by car dealerships. It made me sympathetic to their plight, but it's an old business model and I still prefer the direct sales method being championed by Tesla.

[tomkarlo]

Yeah, that piece. It was great, but it also seemed like they're all doing business the same as in the 60's, at least from an operations standpoint.

[VLM]

In 1997, I bought a new car. Look at that dot matrix printer in the finance office. Bet I'll never see one of those again for the rest of my life.

I got into my financial situation by not wasting money, and it seems a properly maintained 90s car could last 16 years..

You guessed it, October of 2014 and there's still a dot matrix printer in the financial office.

I've worked with cheap lasers and I've worked with expensive lasers and from a labor cost perspective it would take several thousand dollars to get a new laser as fast as the dot matrix, so I can't blame them. The latency of completely printing a form was perhaps 1/4 the time it takes a typical laser to warm the fuser, and surely the energy cost is lower...