What we get wrong
The rest of this library explains how we think the business should work. This one is about the places where we don't manage it. Six failures, what each costs the person standing on the other side of it, and an honest status on whether it is fixed — two of which say no.
These are patterns rather than incidents. Each one describes a way things have gone wrong here more than once, written as a composite so that no customer and no individual is identifiable in it. The failures are real; the specific weeks and people are not reconstructed.
1. We are slow on anything that depends on somebody else, and we treat that as an explanation
A title is behind a lienholder, or a payoff is in transit, or a document has to come from another state. We send what we owe, and then we wait, and the waiting is genuinely outside our control.
The failure isn't the delay. It's what we do with it: we go quiet, because there is no news, and "there's no news" feels like a reason not to call.
Somebody driving on a temporary tag with a date on it, watching that date approach, with no idea whether anyone is working on it. That is not a paperwork problem for them. It is a week of low-grade dread and, at the end, possibly a second trip to a state agency.
The expected date now goes in writing at delivery, and we call on a schedule whether or not there is anything to report — including to say there is nothing to report.
Changed — still fails
2. We once disclosed something out loud instead of in writing
An intermittent fault — the kind that appears on a cold morning and not on a test drive — gets described honestly in conversation at the car, and then does not make it onto the published inspection sheet, because it wasn't present when the sheet was written.
When it recurs, the buyer has a problem and a memory of a conversation. "We told you about that" is worth nothing — correctly. If a disclosure only exists in the seller's recollection, it functionally didn't happen, and the buyer is entitled to treat it as a surprise.
A hard internal rule: anything said out loud about a car's condition gets written on the sheet before the conversation ends, in the buyer's presence. If it isn't written, it didn't count.
Changed — holding
3. We have defended a price we knew was wrong, because changing it in public is embarrassing
We overpay at auction — everyone does, a few times a year. The car goes up at a number that reflects what we paid rather than what it's worth, and then it sits. Week three, it is obvious. Week four, it is still up.
This is a direct contradiction of what we have written in why we post the price. The whole argument for a published number is that it forces the correction to happen where everyone can see it. Delaying the correction is exactly the behavior the policy is supposed to prevent, and pride is the reason.
Us, in carry — the small daily number described in why a price changes while it sits. And a buyer: somebody looked at that car in week two, priced it correctly in their head, and went elsewhere. They were right and we were slow.
Repricing review now happens on fixed day marks and is a rule rather than a judgment, so the decision isn't made on whichever morning we feel able to face it.
Changed — we still argue with the calendar
4. Our published inspection was written for us, not for the person reading it
168 points, published whole, full of shop shorthand: abbreviations, measurements with no context, findings that mean something precise to a technician and nothing at all to anyone else. People told us it was impressive. Then they asked what half of it meant — which is a failure arriving disguised as a compliment.
The entire point of publishing is to let a buyer make their own judgment. A document that can only be evaluated by a specialist transfers no power to anyone; it just looks like transparency. For a while, ours was closer to a display of thoroughness than a tool.
Every finding that isn't self-explanatory now carries a plain sentence next to it saying what it means and whether it matters.
Changed — still too long to read
5. We say "check back next week" when the honest answer is "we won't have it"
Somebody wants a specific thing — a third row, a manual transmission, a particular drivetrain, under a particular number. We have six cars. The odds that one of them will be it next month are poor and we know it.
And we say check back, because saying check back is pleasant and keeps the conversation open, and telling someone to go shop at a store with four hundred cars feels like conceding.
Their time, repeatedly, in exchange for our reluctance to be useful. A person who needs a car by the end of the month does not benefit from being kept warm. We have written a whole article about what scale does better than us and then failed to act on it standing in front of an actual person.
Nothing structural. We catch it sometimes and say it plainly, and the rest of the time the soft answer comes out on its own.
Still true
6. The phone goes unanswered on exactly the days it matters most
One line, a small family, and Saturday. When there are people on the lot, nobody is answering the phone; when the phone is answered promptly, it is Tuesday and nobody is calling. Voicemails sometimes sit until the next morning.
The person calling has no way to know whether they are dealing with a busy small business or a shut one, and a used car lot that doesn't pick up is reasonably assumed to be the second. Some of those people needed one factual answer that would have taken forty seconds.
We have been saying we'll solve this for longer than is comfortable to write down. Every candidate fix — an answering service, a second line, a hired phone person — trades away something that makes the place work, which is an explanation and not an excuse.
Still true
The obvious problem with this page
A dealership publishing its own failures is doing something that looks like honesty and functions, at least partly, as marketing. Candor is a credibility asset, and we know that, and we wrote this anyway — which means the page cannot be its own evidence.
The only thing that would make it worth anything is whether the specific items change. Two of the six above say still true because they are, and leaving them unresolved in writing is the closest thing to a commitment we can make on a webpage. If you have dealt with us and one of these happened to you, the useful response isn't to accept an article — it's to tell us, to our faces, which of them it was. There is nobody here to escalate past, which is the one structural advantage we genuinely have.
The failures described above are composites drawn from recurring patterns on a small lot. No individual customer, employee, vendor or other business is described or identifiable, and no incident here is a report of one particular transaction.