Quote:
PackardV8 wrote:
Packarrd had an excelleent dealer network. WHICH MEANS many dealers and the claassic realestate axiom of "location-location-locaation".
Stud,Nash and hudson suffered from sparse dealer network. Packard did not need Stud,Nash nor Hudson for anything.
According to the Foster book about AMC, at the time of the merger, there were about 7,000 Hudson dealers, over twice as many as Nash had. I'm sure many of those Hudson dealers were very weak as, from the combined 10,000 dealers at the time of the merger, AMC was back to 3,000 in a very few years.
I think it was in the Ward book about Packard, where the comment is made that some of the Packard dealers were so undercapitalized they didn't even have a demonstrator for prospects to drive. I am going from memory, rather than looking it up, Packard only had about 1,800 dealers in the mid 50s. (correctons welcome)
Bottom line, all the independents had weak dealer networks. If a dealer was well capitalized and successful, he could make a lot more money selling one of the big three. And the big three from time to time would go on raiding campaigns to steal the best dealers away from the independents.
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