View From The Trenches

Another tough week! At almost every dealership I went to I had company, and not the kind I like to see. I saw both established shops and gypsy hack shops doing work on lots I usually have had to myself. As we all know, there is no end to competition and with slow times, it just keeps getting worse.

I pull into a lot on Friday morning and lo and behold, a shop that has gained a large share of the area’s used car market over the past five years is doing a car that I had bid on the day before. I went in to get my service install paperwork and saw my old friend Bill (name changed), the service manager, and went inside his office to complain about seeing this company on the lot and about my week as well.

I groused about this company having no license and blah, blah, blah. I told him about the previous day’s experiences, where I had almost started a fight with some hack installer when I questioned his install techniques and pricing.

Bill put down his pen and told me this story:

He was having a very bad day himself awhile back. He did not feel like going to work since he had major decisions ahead and didn’t feel well.

He goes into one of the larger area supermarkets and heads over to the deli where the soup display is. He then sees two guys at the bar, one in a wheelchair and the other guy appears to be blind. The guy in the chair can’t reach the soup so he is trying to direct the blind guy in getting the ladle and pouring soup into a container. Bill relates that this operation was not going smoothly. The ladle operator was not loading the chosen flavor and what he was pouring was not always getting into the container. The sighted sitter was yelling at the blind guy that he was doing it all wrong. The visually impaired guy stops and turns in the direction of his buddy and says, “Hey Jim! Climb off my back. It all looks the same to me!!”

Bill laughed as he repeated the punch line “It looks the same to me.” He then says that his day improved immeasurably after viewing that ironic slice of life.

He got me to laughing and I had to agree that things could indeed be worse. Didn’t know if he was spinning yarns or relating a true story. No matter, the point he was trying to make was all the more poignant because of the storyteller himself

Let me tell you a little about Bill. He has had one heck of a lousy year. He is 50 years old and discovered he had intestinal cancer around March. He has had surgery, chemo and radiation in 2007. He has lost 75 lbs and missed only about three weeks of work. He is still not out of the woods yet but the prognosis is far better than it was a few months ago.

His mom died just before his surgery. In fact, he was taking off later that day to fly with his dad up to Seattle to dispose of his mom’s ashes with the rest of his brothers and sisters. Here he was trying to cheer me up. The blind showing the emotional cripple a path to take.

Hopefully the moral to this incident is obvious to you, the reader. We all have our bad days, bad weeks and unfortunately our bad years as well. Yet we are usually far luckier than so many others. If we count our blessings more, we’ll have far less time to dwell on the negative.

I am not a Pollyanna. I know what a tough business we are in. I’ve survived in it for more than two decades. Still, I’m glad I got reminded that there’s something more to life than thinking about my own travails.

The social scientist Marshall McLuhan once wrote that “the medium is the message.” Insurance companies in their television advertising realize this concept. I think it all started with having a “good neighbor.” Next came the thought of being in “good hands.” When geckos started to talk with Aussie accents along with neurotic Neanderthals wearing Dockers, it became painfully obvious that insurance companies are trying to re-invent themselves as warm, fuzzy caring institutions. They are trying to prove once again that if you broadcast something enough times, the viewing public tends to believe it as fact.

We in the AGRR industry know full well, along with Katrina claimants, that the opposite is true. The only thing dear to the heart of any insurance company is the concept of limiting claims and retaining premium as profit. The latest proclamation of hubris occurred when Allstate faxed to its participating glass shops its new pricing models. They, of course, were adjusted lower due to the new NAGS but the reasoning was pure arrogance. The pricing was deemed necessary so that Allstate could “remain competitive and profitable,” which I think means, “better us be profitable than you.” (CLICK HERE for related story.)

Well, my friends, as Thomas Paine once wrote: “These are times that try men’s souls.” The auto glass business as a whole has not been one swimming in black ink this past decade. Of the national and regional chains, many have embraced the Wal-Mart price models of high numbers, low profit margins. We have just seen two of the oldest and largest vertically integrated auto glass companies be sold. The probability of further mergers and acquisitions loom on the horizon as the battle for market share and national coverage heats up—not to mention the increasing numbers of minimally qualified people that try to pass themselves off as tradesmen in an auto glass industry that continues to siphon business away from legitimate installation firms. As prices erode further, so does any hope of real long-term profitability.

However this essay is not about us—AGRR. It is about insurance companies being the barnyard denizens they are, putting on a dress and calling themselves society matrons. The Madison Avenue makeover is offensive because it tries to show insurers possessing either humanity or altruism and none of those traits exists in their claims practices.

Much of the American public is oblivious to that subject. They have no clue that their casualty company will micro-manage their claims experience to minimize the financial impact on that company. The type of parts and the installation methods used in the collision repair and glass replacement industries have been greatly affected (and not for the good) by those claims practices.

So as I watch my TV and come upon these insurance image makeovers, I just shake my head in disbelief. The sad thing is, when that darn green salamander extols the virtue of butter on an English muffin, I have to agree with him.

Mr. Duffy’s opinions are solely his own and not necessarily those of glassBYTEs.com™.