Holden dealers exaggerate job losses
Holden dealers imminently to close. But still diligently pumping out the bullshit. That’s real commitment to Australia…
Captain’s log, stardate Friday the 13th of March 2020, happily enough.
28 days from now, Holden dealers could wake up to a new reality: telling the truth.
The developed world is battling a global toilet paper shortage - doubtless a harbinger of the forthcoming zombie apocalypse. (I’ve seen all the movies.) Maybe as early as next week.
Rupert Murdoch soon to announce his suite of tabloids and broadsheets worldwide is a suitable substitute - but only for right-wing arseholes. There will be a means test, I’m told. Same shit, different day, for the rest of us.
The Australian Grand Prix has been infected by zombies early - and whatnot - and cancelled. Last-minute attempts by emergency services to re-float the irrelevant Melbourne F1 race by filling Albert Park with stockpiled hand sanitizer from the federal reserve have failed.
Sham contract
GM continues to bone Holden dealers in the most non-consensual manner possible.
Holden dealers are shocked and outraged at suddenly being violated. It’s as if they are treated in the manner of Holden retail customers. Turning the tables like this, so late in play, is very cruel indeed - personal opinion.
What have car dealers ever done to deserve this manner of treatment, I ask you?
GM appears to be hell-bent on low-balling dealerships in terms of the compensation packages they’re prepared to pay for early termination of each dealer’s worthless franchise agreement. It’s a production line - and the end product is dead franchises.
Holden has 185 near-death dealers operating 203 tumbleweed-filled showrooms. Dealers have engaged specialist lawyers WD & HO Arsehole and Associates and a room full of beancounters, by way of counter-attack. It’s like a ‘who’s who’ of Hades at the work in progress meetings, I’m sure.
Arsehole Six, Prime Mincer Scum Morrison, recently took time out from his busy schedule bothering God and throwing colleagues under the bus to save his own sorry arse, to meet with Holden dealers concerned about the pain of upcoming GM pineapple insertion.
Meanwhile, actual Australian battlers doing it tough and getting bent over right now by various carmakers - I’m looking at you, Audi - who are systematically violating owners of older used vehicles with potentially deadly Takata airbags, they don’t get a meeting with the PM. Because they’re just little people. Clearly.
But car dealers, those pillars of societal virtue, “Clear my diary and warm up the coffee,” he probably says. “Order in some pastries. And the hookers. Let’s have a damn dealer conference.”
Holden promised 24 new models by 2024…in October 2017.
Bullshit by numbers
Holden’s dealer council - you might like to think of them as a kind of Satan’s little helper focus group - claims, apparently, that the imminent closure of their premises, by way of GM guillotine, will affect an astonishingly huge number of workers:
“We just want a fair deal so we can transition our businesses and look after our 9000 workers. Our employees have done nothing wrong and we need enough compensation to help them into other jobs, or risk making them redundant.”
- unnamed Holden dealer
Wow, 9000 workers. Really? That’s, allegedly, what one Holden dealer - too gutless to have his name associated with his bullshit statement (personal opinion - allegedly told CarAdvice, allegedly, yesterday. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this allegation published: 9000 workers. Across 203 showrooms. Allegedly.
The implication being, apparently, that 9000 jobs are on the line unless something high-level is done to get GM back on the leash.
In the immortal words of renowned social philosopher Elvis Costello, “listen to the propaganda, listen to the latest slander, pump it up, until you can feel it. Pump it up, when you don’t really need it”.
Holden sold about 43,000 vehicles last year.
If it takes 9000 staff to do that, I will walk down George Street, faster than the light rail (not hard), with my with my cock out, for all the world to see. I certainly hope it’s a warm day.
So, 43,000 vehicles divided by 9000 staff is about five vehicles per staff member. Slightly less, but let’s call it five. If that’s the case, you could close every dealership, hand each staff member $50 grand and just say, “Look, have a year off - just see if you can sell six cars on eBay, over the next 12 months. There’s a good chap.”
Result: 20 per cent increase in sales; overhead costs - slashed. Let’s think about this another way: 9000 staff at, say, $60 grand a head. That’s, ahh, $540 million in salaries, divided by 43,000 cars.
That’s, umm, $12,600. That’s the profit margin you need to maintain in each car, on average, just to pay the friggin’ wages. It’s complete bullshit.
Those dealers really are hoping nobody can do basic arithmetic aren’t they? It’s safe to assume there’s never been a Barina or a Trax, or an Astra with $12 grand in it, just for the salaries.
Finally: 9000 staff divided by 203 showrooms - that’s 44 staff. At the average Holden dealer. 44. Where exactly are these 44 alleged workers at an average Holden dealership?
I’d submit, on the numbers alone, that you dealer dudes, in my opinion, really are full of shit. I guess some things never change.
Sixth sense
Allegedly this is what Arsehole Six told representative dealers in his office in Parliament House.
“I won’t have big overseas corporates destroying Australian family businesses.”
- Scummo
It’s yet another avalanche of do-nothing, audience-appeasing, indefensible, Prime Mince-sterial bullshit - clearly.
Idiot Six seems incapable of understanding that all he is empowered to do, by virtue of his position, is enforce existing laws. (And keep the rest of the world assured Australia is a third-world laughing stock. He’s quite adept at this.
He’s hardly a dictator, although with a makeover he could pass as Kim Jong Un with a lobotomy. Governments make legislation. If laws are not being broken, there is no action they can take. The dealers have a contract with Holden - it defines the terms and conditions of their lawful financial arrangements.
Presumably each franchise contract has an early termination clause. As long as GM doesn’t breach the contract, Dumb Shit Six has no ‘intervention’ leg to stand on. What can he do in the case of no laws being broken? Nothing. What leverage does he have against GM or the US in general? None. GM is outta here, and Scummo is a Trump brown-noser. He’s thus on the back foot.
All he can do is pray, I suppose - but he’s already using up a hell of a lot of bandwidth there, as I understand it, what with the recent fires, climate change (which is apparently real now - even to him) and of course the recent zombie apocalypse, against which hand sanitizer and toilet paper is proving oddly powerless, despite the best efforts of the CSIRO.
Heavens above
If I were God, I’d be getting a little sick of Scummo, whining at me and imploring me incessantly for advice and/or assistance.
I’d be saying: ‘You shat the bed, mate. Perhaps you should change the sheets.’ Purely in the interest of personal growth and development.
I certainly hope the sky fairy in charge of the universe, or as I know him, Jack Bauer, had the good sense to build ‘mute’ functionality into the prayer trunk line to the clouds.
I mean, from time to time at least, you would want to kick back and listen to the harp music, and the screams of the damned, from below. Perhaps with the impending zombie apocalypse, there’s be plenty more screams to come.
Mazda’s CX-70 is a large five-seat SUV with generous legroom, loads of equipment and a supremely comfortable ride. It’s one of four new additions to the brand’s prestige model onslaught, but for a fraction the price of a premium German SUV.