Carvana and the dealership visit people would rather skip

I have bought three cars through Carvana. I am not going back to a dealership. I could spend the rest of this article explaining that I like convenience, but the internet has existed for a while and I assume you have used it.

The interesting part is what that choice looks like from inside the industry I have worked in. A customer can leave a buying process much more easily than a dealer can leave the business model built around it.

That is the conflict. The customer is comparing ways to buy a car. The dealer is operating inside a structure of manufacturer relationships, state rules, associations, peer groups and assumptions about how a dealership is supposed to make money. Changing the website does not make that structure disappear.

The dealership has a dealership problem

NADA explicitly advocates for the franchise system and the state laws governing the relationship between manufacturers and franchised dealers. Its association network includes state and metropolitan dealer organizations. This is an organized effort to represent and preserve a particular model of vehicle retailing, not simply a collection of stores independently deciding how to sell things. [1] [2]

The franchise agreement and the applicable law are one kind of constraint. A 20 group, an association membership and a long-established operating habit are different kinds. They do not all legally require the same behavior. Together, though, they help define what an industry regards as normal, reasonable and worth defending.

That is what I mean when I say dealers are locked in. Some of the walls are contractual. Some are institutional. Some are the accumulated weight of being surrounded by people whose answer to change is to compare notes on how to keep doing the same thing.

NADA describes its 20 Groups around peer exchange and financial benchmarking. [3] I understand the attraction. My problem is the frame: how far can a conversation go if success is defined primarily by comparison with other businesses operating inside the same model?

You can become the best-run version of something a customer is deliberately avoiding. Congratulations. The other prisoners voted your cell the nicest.

Carvana is where my money went

Carvana sells used vehicles; it is not a franchised new-car dealership. [4] The franchise agreement is a real distinction. It explains part of the dealer’s situation; it does not obligate the customer to accept the experience built around it.

But the customer does not have to solve that problem before choosing an alternative.

That is the part I find fascinating as someone who works in marketing and design. Inside a business, the existing process can have a hundred explanations. Outside it, a person can simply decide they do not want to participate.

The reasons may be real. They still do not create an obligation for me to come back.

I did not buy three cars to express an opinion about dealership reform. I bought cars. The industry can argue about the model afterward. My transaction is already over.

The cage has a trade association

The business can spend years defending the institutions around it, then describe itself as helpless when those institutions make a different experience difficult. Protection and constraint are not unrelated accidents. Sometimes they are two consequences of preserving the same arrangement.

That does not make every wall easy to remove. It makes the demand that the customer respect the walls particularly tiresome. The industry has organizations, influence and an immense investment in deciding what vehicle retailing should look like. Its preferred use of that machinery is part of the story.

Meanwhile, marketing gets another assignment to make the customer excited about entering. A century of inherited economics, relationships and habits, handed over as a lead-generation problem. Perhaps a fresher font will dismantle the prison.

The model is the argument

What exhausts me is the claim that the industry wants transformation followed by an explanation of why every structural part of the business must remain beyond discussion.

That is maintenance with a keynote speaker.

I see a model carrying generations of habits, protections and self-justification, and customers who can increasingly choose not to care about its reasons. The people inside it have a much harder problem than finding better language for an ad. They have to decide which parts they are actually willing to challenge, including through the organizations that represent them.

I am interested in that conflict because I work inside it and buy outside it. There is no neat five-step ending. Anyone promising one is probably already pricing the workshop.

Break the model, or shut the fuck up about wanting change. I have no interest in another explanation of why the customer should learn to love the cage.