Driving Sports

Times are hard. The world is facing a global economic crisis. Every day, we hear about more layoffs from multinational corporations, multi-billion dollar bailout plans, and economic stimulus packages. People are hanging onto their money and paying the rent or feeding the family clearly takes precedence over a turbo upgrade or a set of wheels. In all honesty, who can really blame them? However, with the global economic crisis affecting our spending habits, some truly problematic issues have arisen in the small segment of the global economy known as the automotive aftermarket industry. Many of these problems have been around for years, and in some cases decades; yet only recently in the past couple years have these problems truly reared their ugly heads into the lives of car enthusiasts.

My perspective when it comes to the aftermarket industry is a bit unique. I'm a consumer, just like everyone else, I'm a vendor who also wholesales to other vendors along with selling retail, and I'm also involved in the media that watches over and reports on everything that happens in the industry. With my eyes in different places and my head under different hats, I understand what it's like to want to hold onto my money and not buy something new for my car, but at the same time, I understand what it's like trying to stay afloat as a business in this rough economic market. On top of all this, here I am blogging about this experience to anyone and everyone who are reading. So, what are these problems in the aftermarket industry that I speak of? After careful thought, observation, and discussion, I hypothesize that the main problem isn't the economy: it's the people. The economy obviously plays a large role in everyone's lives, but I believe that at the same time, it's being used as a scapegoat to bring reasoning to or even excuse the behavior of people.

Who are these people in which I speak? It's not the high school kid who bought a Civic EG hatchback and can barely afford to pay for gas and insurance. It's not the Internet-based vendor who runs their business out of their basement at home to help fund their college education. It's not even the high-priced JDM parts company that manufacturers titanium exhaust systems. The people in question here are those who in the most cliche of terms, have their cake and want to eat it too. These are the people who behave abusively to the vendors that they're attempting to purchase from. These are the people who are satisfied with offering poorly-manufactured or engineered products to their clientele. These are the people who are more than willing to make only a few bucks on a sale just to make sure that they get the sale and not someone else.
These are the people who believe that a vendor should take a loss on a sale just to satisfy their price matching requests. These are the people who avoid patent or copyright infringement problems by manufacturing their products overseas. Still not following me? I'll go ahead and cite a few examples.

We've already established that the economy is affecting everyone. Given the state of the economy, I can fully understand that price is a factor to most people, but it also goes the same for vendors as well. Thus, it's not surprising that consumers will try to find the lowest price possible to suit their needs. However, this does not excuse someone from blatantly lying about a price quote they've received from another vendor. A few months ago, I received a price inquiry for a set of Advan wheels. I responded very quickly to the inquiry and presented the customer with a fair price, which was also well within the Advan MAP policy. The response I received back was quite shocking, with the customer asking me to match a price that was not only well below MAP policy, but so low that it wouldn't even be worth the sale since after shipping and processing fees, very little money would be made. Responses like this aren't too much of a surprise, but this person just happened to supposedly copy and paste the price quote from the other vendor, much like as if you brought a print ad from one grocery store to another. Knowing the other vendor quite well, I knew that something just wasn't right. After some back and forth communication with our mutual distributor, both myself and the other vendor in question came to the conclusion that this price quote was tampered with in order to favor the customer. We figured this out because both myself and the other vendor received the exact same inquiry, only that our names had been switched. In other words, the customer was trying to get the super low price out of the other vendor, while citing me as writing the price quote. I would love to say this was an isolated incident, but just last week this exact same situation with a different customer happened to me yet again. Coincidence? Perhaps. However, with the rise of price match requests that I have been receiving within the last few months, I wouldn't be surprised if most of those requests were simply customers lying through their teeth. And, to top it all off: some other vendor ended up selling the customer the parts at the ridiculously low price, and they were happy with it just because we didn't get the sale.

But customers just want to get a good deal, right? Sure, but at the expense of lying? Granted, it's not illegal in the traditional sense, but in my mind it's as much a scam as sending money to phisher from Nigeria. Along those same lines of price matching, there's also been some customers who actually get angry at you if you don't price match, even if you haven't even sold them anything yet. Case in point, just today I was speaking with another vendor and they told me that when he refused to price match another vendor because he would lose money on the part, the customer told him, "good luck selling it at that price" and then proceeded to laugh at him. Was that really necessary? This kind of abusive behavior would kind of make you want to get out of the aftermarket parts business, wouldn't it?

Oh, but that's just part of our job as vendors, because the customer is always right. Emphatically, I would respond with a big "NO." These types of expectations from customers are completely unreasonable. In another example, a customer told another vendor that they should take a loss on the impending sale because they would gain a loyal customer for life and they could sell the same parts to this customer's friends for full MSRP. I sure wouldn't want to be that customer's friends, that's for sure. Plus, customer loyalty is something that has been progressively disappearing lately, since price has become the utmost importance to the majority of the customers out there. I once had a customer, who had already spent at least $10,000 with our company, tell me that he was going to buy a part from another vendor because they offered a lower price than we did. "I'll just buy it from these guys, and I'll give you a call to schedule an install appointment," the customer told me. Gee, thanks.

On the other side of the coin, customers also have very legitimate reasons to be angry right back at certain vendors and manufacturers. Unfortunately, often times they don't realize they should even be angry to begin with. When I appeared on DSTV Live last week, the main conversation topic that Ryan and I discussed was my letter to Modified Mag that spoke about knock-off parts and how they're affecting the industry. Mentioned during the live segment that certain knock-offs have their place in the market, because of the price point. In addition, these specific knock-off parts are not marketed to be just as good or even anywhere close in quality as the products that they replicate. Nothing to be angry about here from the consumer side, so long as they too share this understanding. The parts that consumers should be angry about are the parts that have a way of insulting our intelligence, which in turn also wastes our money. These are parts such as the knock-off short shifters that have been known to break while shifting and the suspension systems that make constant noise, offer rough ride quality, and eventually in some cases even fuse themselves together, rendering them useless. Within the past 2 years, the market has been flooded with low-quality parts such as these thanks to their very attractive low price point. While this includes most of the infamous "eBay parts," there are a good number of these parts that market themselves to be not only better than those eBay parts, but also just as good as the parts that are at least twice as expensive. "More " levels of dampening adjustment means they're just as good, if not better than Cusco? I think not. Since the market has been flooded with parts such as these under the guise of "we're making these high end parts affordable for everyone," many customers have been almost brainwashed to thinking that these products are actually high in quality and that's the way things should be. I'm sorry, a quality-made set of coilovers shouldn't ever make clunking noises, shouldn't provide a rough ride everywhere you go no matter what the dampening setting, and shouldn't ever have problems with rust or the springs fusing them to the struts. Why is this so hard for people to understand?

All of these problems, both on the customer and vendor/manufacturer side, are contributing to the overall problems of the aftermarket industry. Customers with unrealistic or unreasonable expectations aren't going to want to buy parts, and the vendors aren't going to want to sell the parts either if all of their customers are going to turn out this way. Those that do will continue to lose money and eventually cease to exist. Manufacturers and vendors who are pushing low-quality products are gradually pushing away the higher-quality manufacturers that are generally higher in price due to their higher quality-control and superior material costs. Thus, while money is the underlying issue involved in all of this, the people involved are just as much at fault for the problem to begin with. So how do we solve this? We as customers should demand high quality products and equally as good customer service, while still understanding that businesses need to make money in order to keep selling us products. A vendor who has treated you well in the past and even given you discounts deserves your loyalty. The vendors should also push high quality products, not because they're expensive, but because their high quality will make your customers happy in the long run and keep them coming back to you when they need something new. Finally, manufacturers should use their own ingenuity to make a better product than other manufacturers, rather than simply using lower quality materials and outsourcing manufacturing to overseas to save money. All of these ideas won't magically save the industry over night, but I have no doubt they will at least help the industry in the long run and keep the good businesses alive until the economy recovers. Change in the aftermarket industry? Yes, we can!