Anyone Buying A Car In The Bad Weather?

Much of Britain has been gripped by some of the worst weather we’ve apparently seen in fifty years. Public transport has been severely disrupted. Rail networks have halted some services and delayed many others. Bus operators are struggling. People have been stranded or had to sleep in their cars overnight. It’s ‘Frozen Britain’, as the news would have you all believe.

How can this snowy mess that we’re all in be turned to anyone’s advantage, I hear you cry? Well, it’s simple. There are two things you can do. The first thing is, if you have a car capable of any sort of journey without getting stuck (let’s say you own a Range Rover), make the journey. Roads are relatively quiet if not exactly perfect for driving. Point two is to buy a new car in this time.

What on Earth do I mean? Very simple. Even in cold weather, in fact whatever the weather, car sales must keep coming in. You’ll have seen the signs up in local dealerships, the sorts of things that say 2010 starting/New Year sale. But who would buy a car when it’s covered in a good foot of snow? The canny buyer of course.

Let’s say you’re ‘Joe Average dealership’. You’ll know that, to meet revenue targets (A level business school readers can probably skip this bit) you’ll need to hit your sales targets, which likely as not means a monthly target for your dealership which is filtered down to a ‘sales per salesperson per week’ tally.

Now, given that I saw precisely nobody at my local ‘Joe Average dealership’, this should actually give you quite a bit of leverage when it comes to either speccing the options list or indeed negotiating a discount. You could, after all, be one of only a few customers that day. Perhaps, in an out of town place not on a motorway network, the only customer. Failing that, you could always simply use the services and get a free cup of coffee if you’re stranded again in your old motor somewhere…