2019 Chevy Colorado LT. Came with the plastic bed and tailgate liner. Kids bought me a Line-X spray in liner. Had it installed yesterday. The tailgate has a access panel to get to the lock mechanism. There are 8 screws holding the panel to the tailgate. The screws have a captive bushing and washer to fit through the GM plastic liner. When the spray liner was done, the screws will not seat due to the bushing/washer sticking up about 1/4 inch. Stopped at a GM dealer to buy 8 screws that they would use without the liner. NONE IN STOCK IN ARKANSAS. Have to order from warehouse in North Carolina. $5.80 each (times 8). Nope, nope and no way. Stopped at NAPA and the counter guy looked at the screw and went to his magic book, and, 1 bag of 15 for $5. Yup. I can't believe GM gets $5.80 for a freaking screw.

Yep, all this auto stuff is marked up to insane prices. It’s a game. I just bought a new Honda and added some accessories. I found an online dealer who sold at about 60% of list. My local dealer didn’t especially like it, but matched the price.

I have a friend who is a parts manager at a dealership and works off of commission. He has absolutely no incentive to discount anything

Best to buy factory parts online. I’ve had two parts counter guys (1 at a Chevy dealer and 1 at a Honda dealer) tell me in the past that they refuse to even come close to online prices. So, I refuse to pay their ridiculous markup.

It could be worse. You could be driving a Ford.

Went to the Ford place with some friends as they bought an F-150. After purchasing, we went to the parts department and asked if they would sell us the screw that was missing from the tailgate liner. $340 was the answer we got. They said we'd need to buy a replacement panel to get the screws because they aren't sold separately.

As fate would have it, I found one of these tailgate screws laying on the ground in the Lowes parking lot about two weeks later. What are the odds?

Some of you know I was in dealership fixed operations (parts of a dealership other than new and used car sales) for just short of fifty years. Been out a couple of years.

Many times dealerships use a system that is called matrix pricing. Basically a formula to change percentage over cost markup to be more in line with the actual labor involved to look up the part, locate and pull the part and process (paperwork handling) the purchase. The theory behind this is that it takes the same amount of that labor to sell a part for a dollar as it does to sell a part for one hundred dollars.

Matrix has it's place but there has to be some rational way how it is implemented, the level of pricing it kicks in and out at and the ability for the counterman to be able to override that pricing when necessary. For example, the last dealership parts department I managed was put under a strict matrix system that my dealer implemented on the advice of his consultant that he hired. Of course when a customer could go three miles away and pay a dollar and a half for the same light bulb that I now was required to sell for almost eight dollars both the dealer and his consultant could not understand the drop in retail and wholesale business but blamed the parts manager (me) and my crew for not "trying harder", the exact wording from the dealer. I left one month after that was implemented. A one third drop in my net pay due to the loss of business and a "restructuring of my compensation package" as the dealer put it for the month told me all I needed to know.

We all would get some customers that deserved matrix pricing. When I was in commercial trucks I had one customer that would buy some roached out truck and come in for small hardware, nuts, screws, clips, etc. Never big parts. And each time it would take either myself or my assistant a lot of time to fill his orders. While he was standing there. And arguing over pricing. One of his more memorable trips took me over an hour, total price including tax was under forty dollars. I was on a net profit commission basis, with customers like that there was no way I could be profitable, in fact the gross profit of what I sold him (difference between cost and sale price) did not even cover my pay for that hour. That is a good example of why dealers use matrix.

As I have stated here before, if an online dealer offers a part at an very low price be sure to check all the way to the checkout screen, some of those dealers play the game of low prices but make it up on the shipping and handling side, not all but some of them do play that game.

Generally the factory dealer cost to suggested customer price markup is a bit under forty cents on the dollar. That pays for the building, salaries, support personnel, trucks, equipment, insurance on the building, vehicles and inventory, a lot of fingers into the pie. A lot of places use matrix today, you might be surprised, and not just all of them are car dealerships, same theory works in other businesses too. Not saying it is right or a one size fits all but it does have it's place sometimes.

Hope this gives you some understanding of the whole picture.

I understand the parts business, and have used on-line dealer parts for both my Volvos and my Hyundai, and saved a metric shit-ton of money, even with shipping. But, $5.80 for one (1) screw with a captive washer is crazy, when I bought 15 for $5 at NAPA.

I have a fleet of Thermax carpet cleaning machines. I can buy parts from the Thermax people -- things like a # 8 lock washer, for only $1.25. Yup, a plain old nothing-special-about-it lock washer. I could pay a buck and a quarter for one of these, or I can go elsewhere and get a box of 100 for two or three bucks.

If you need advice on that part, sometimes it is worth it. I run a business and understand overhead. People do not like to pay for professional advice. Think it should be free.

Believe me I get what Johnny and V-Tail are saying. The prices of some of that hardware makes me stop and wonder too, for example the push in retainers for door trim panels. A friend asked me to pick him up some from work, I agreed until I saw the pricing. Even with my employee pricing, 10% over book dealer cost it was way overboard. Just as an FYI most dealers have an outside hardware supplier that stocks screws,washers,nuts, clips,etc, the disposable items.

While we did carry some of those purchased from the OEM source it usually was only the specialty ones that were not grouped in the 8.800 and 8.900 category. To explain those numbers, GM groups their parts by a similar system to the Dewey Decimal System that libraries use, 8.800 and 8.900 were disposables, chemicals, lubricants and "common" hardware, off the shelf normal hardware store fasteners, clips, etc. The ones that were specialized uncommon ones were grouped in the specific vehicle section like engine, transmission, etc.

Another obscene pricing item, while I do not remember the exact model but the inside door handle while removable was not an item that was available separately, only as part of the door trim panel. Retail pricing was somewhere north of six hundred dollars. It took awhile but GM finally offered the handle as a serviceable item, probably after they saw warranty costs go through the roof with that debacle.

Again, don't get me wrong, I'm not defending, just explaining. The last few years I scratched my head many times and said "WTF"

Something that may have changed since is that GM did not warehouse a lot of parts but kept suppliers on the hook to produce them years after the production run ended, often at ridiculously low prices. Where the supplier once produced tens of thousands for the price, GM might order 20 a month.

Shovelhead hit it on the nose. My dad was in parts/svc/fixed ops for 30 years with GM (Chevrolet & Saturn), Honda & Nissan/Datsun. Matrix pricing

There's a few Honda dealers here that I would avoid for this reason.

I would work with customers on pricing if they were reasonable in their request and were polite about it. It is the ones that would demand that I give them a discount are the ones that got nothing from me.

One of the last memorable demanding ones said in a sarcastic tone "And what will you do if I don't take it?" to which I replied "I'll put it back on the shelf and you will wait five days for that online one. I'll sell it to someone else and that's that."

He paid full tilt retail, end of the story.

quote:

Originally posted by shovelhead:
I would work with customers on pricing if they were reasonable in their request and were polite about it. It is the ones that would demand that I give them a discount are the ones that got nothing from me.

One of the last memorable demanding ones said in a sarcastic tone "And what will you do if I don't take it?" to which I replied "I'll put it back on the shelf and you will wait five days for that online one. I'll sell it to someone else and that's that."

He paid full tilt retail, end of the story.

My dad has some great stories of jackass customers at the parts counter.
I spent some of my childhood in dealerships (parts/warehouse/shop) & enjoyed it.

quote:

My dad has some great stories of jackass customers at the parts counter.
I spent some of my childhood in dealerships (parts/warehouse/shop) & enjoyed it.

We had a NAPA store, I worked there from 14-17ish. This was a store in small-town Alabaster, AL. Saturdays were full of disheveled women coming in for parts on order from their husband and having no idea specifics of car, engine, year, what he actually needed, etc. Watching them sort that out on phone was funny, talking to the yahoo on the other end less so once they got frustrated.

Once had a guy on the phone that was whining that we closed too early, that night at 6 P.M., like the six other dealerships at that time within a half mile of each other.

So he said to me "Will you leave the part outside by the door with the bill and I'll leave the money so you can get it in the morning" to which I quickly replied "Why don't you leave the money outside by the door tonight and if it's there in the morning I'll leave the part so you can get it tomorrow night."

He didn't see the humor in that......but I did!

Is that my price?
Had a preacher ask for a love offering discount.

Oh yeah those guys that have their wives do the asking frustrated me, I’d ask to put their husband on the line. One guy was real nice to me & heard him mutter to his bride, get those goddamn eggs and bacon goin’ now!

I hopped the counter for 10 years. Plenty of belly laughs.

I appreciate a good counter man. One that can listen to your car mix (like my 57 with 3 decades of small block Chevy engine parts), nod and say “Yep, hold a sec. I know what you need.” And be right.

But online isn’t a panacea. Cowl clip for Jaguar X-Type, $4.97. Bag of 15 of same clips as used on Taurus/Sable... $4.97. All online pricing.

Third store I worked at, summer of '72. Lady comes in asking if we had anything to clean vinyl tops, seems she got wax on it. Slow day so the other counterman and I go out to see how bad it was, usually it could be just wiped off with a bit of rubbing.

She told us it was a new black Impala Custom, those had the same roofline as a Caprice, squared off sail panel. And as we are going out there she is telling us that she waxed her husband's car as a surprise. He had it a couple of months and he loved and babied it. He was out of town for work and was coming home that evening.

We round the corner of the building and we both stopped dead. How I kept from laughing I don't know to this day. She waxed the car top to bottom including the previously black vinyl top, now sort of black and white.

Told her to get a small brush for mechanic's hands and start scrubbing. Bet it had a nice shine afterwards/

Tangential, but having been in the business, it irks my dad to go to a parts place.

IIRC it was an o'Reilly, needed an in line filter to put on one of our ranch trucks, kid at the counter had no idea how to pull one up without a vehicle year/make/model. The truck we were putting it on doesn't have one OEM, so the recipient vehicle was irrelevant.

We ended up getting lucky & guessing a model that does & proceeded from there.

My dad still remembers Datsun/Nissan part numbers from the 80s, when there wasn't always a computer to rely on.