In A Yugo

Ridgewood Lincoln dealership struggling

The automaker will give him no more than six Lincolns a month, he says, and even those few are hard to sell. Lincoln ranked eighth last year among all luxury brands in sales.

Loyal Mercury customers are trading in their leased vehicles and he has no replacement cars to offer in their price range, so Smith wants to add hot-selling Ford Fusions, Fiestas and Explorers to the showroom, but the manufacturer denied his requests for an additional franchise agreement that would allow him to sell Fords.

Making matters worse, the automaker wants Smith to spend about $1 million on renovations. If he doesn't, he will lose important cash incentives, making it hard, if not impossible, to compete with other Lincoln dealers on price, he says.

"I'd say [Ford is] picking on us, to put it nicely," says Smith, whose father started the business in 1949.

The dealership's longtime general manager, Adam Mularczyk, is more blunt. "It's a predetermined way to kill us,'' he says. "The program is to get rid of all the little dealers."

Ford did not respond to requests for comment.

Jim Appleton, president of New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers, declined to comment on Smith's problems, but he says that all over the state, downtown dealerships have been disappearing at an accelerated pace.

"Over the last 4 1/2 years we lost more than 20 percent of the [dealership] rooftops in the state, and most of them are smaller dealers in downtown locations which, rightly or wrongly, are no longer considered by the manufacturers to be prime automotive retail locations," Appleton says. Some were casualties of bankruptcy filings in 2009 by Chrysler LLC and General Motors Corp., which were able to get bankruptcy judges to terminate franchise contracts.

The trend has been to concentrate dealerships on busy highways in ever bigger and fancier showrooms, he says.

Smith says his dealership, which has been located next to the Ridgewood train station for decades, is the last of many new-car dealers to have operated in a village that is home to about 25,000 people who have a median household income of more than $120,000. He has seen Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac, Ford, Plymouth, Peugeot and Yugo dealers fade from the scene over the past 20 years or so, he says.

Mularczyk complains that Ford's regional sales managers do not appreciate the value of being located next to train station in an affluent downtown business district. "We have a steel highway here with 1,500 to 1,800 people a day looking at our facility. How much are we going to hurt Ford Motor Co. to display a logo and sell more cars? Who would be losing?" Mularczyk says.

In a Yugo.. in THEE RANT Forum

In a Yugo - Paul Shanklin
(Mel: In the Ghetto)

As the snow flies

At a used car lot on the edge of town
A liberal guy and a liberal gal
Buy a Yugo

And they drive with pride

Cause if there's one thing that this world needs
It's environmental friends who'll take the lead
In a Yugo

They say, "people don't you understand
Those suburbans are ruining the land"
But they'll wish they had a full size van one day
They point fingers at you and me
They say we're too blind to see
But do we simply use our heads
And choose another way?

As those small wheels turn
Fifty miles to the gallon
And their knees on their chest
They're gonna save enough gas
For all of the rest
In a Yugo

Then one day on the interstate
They suddenly lose control
They swerve to miss a baby duck
They're squashed beneath a produce truck

But they drove with pride...

And as the crowds drive past a little flat car
You know they saved a lot of gas
But they didn't get far
In a Yugo

And as they're trapped inside
At a used car lot on the other side of town
A liberal guy and a liberal gal
Buy a Yugo....

And they drive with pride...

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