Rip-off Report.com - badbusinessbureau.com

Does GM Have too Many Dealers?
Maybe One - Bill Heard Chevrolet

Many auto industry analysts claim that part of GM's problem is that it has too many dealers. As a whole, I don't necessarily agree with that. I'm thinking of the rural towns where the only new car dealer is a GM dealer. If you get rid of those dealers, the business just goes away. To a lesser extend it's true in urban areas also that the less convenient that you make buying and servicing a car, the fewer cars you will sell.

Anyway, that being said, there are bad apples that need to be thrown away. My nominee for bad apple #1 is Bill Heard Chevrolet. Bill Heard Chevrolet has several locations across the southern tier of the US, and from the trail of complaints and legal actions reported on the web, Bill Heard Chevrolet may be the worst auto dealer in the country. Ripoffreport.com lists 129 consumer complaints against Bill Heard Chevrolet. A good portion of the complaints involve spot delivery abuses (yo-yo sales), but there are other types of complaints as well. Two minutes on Google revealed attorney general actions in Texas, Tennessee, Florida and Georgia. A Google search of "Bill Heard" (Enterprises OR Chevrolet) and "Attorney General" yielded an astounding 46,900 hits.

What does the organization do when the heat is on? Well, that's when the campaign contributions come in handy and the influence peddling comes into play. According to the Atlanta Journal and Constitution (www.ajc.com), when the Georgia Department of Consumer Affairs started to come down on Bill Heard Chevrolet concerning deceptive advertising claims, the agency's administrator received a visit from a representative of the governor asking the agency to back down. The Bill Heard organization just happens to be a big contributor and fund-raiser for the governor, don't you know.

Bill Heard Enterprises is one of the Top 10 Dealer groups in the country, bringing in $1.4 billion in revenue for new car sales alone according to Wardsauto.com. Even though the Heard Operation is big, the number of complaints and the diversity and outrageousness of the alleged bad conduct seem to set Bill Heard Chevrolet in a class all by itself.

IF you combine Bill Heard's sales with GM's head-in-the-sand management, it should come as no surprise that Bill Heard was named one of GM's "Dealers of the Year" in 2005. The moral of the story: it's important to reward quality - or was that quantity - whatever.



Rip-off Report.com - badbusinessbureau.com