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March 12, 2010

Town's Edge gets its Chevy groove back on

By Brian Ojanpa The Free Press

MOUNTAIN LAKE — Brian Harder didn’t leap up and click his heels in joy when the phone call came, but no one would have faulted him if he had.

Instead, he went to give the news to his head sales guy, then to his head service guy. As one might enjoy a fine wine, he doled out the good tidings in savored sips.

“Everybody was happy as could be,” the general manager of Town’s Edge Auto in Mountain Lake said.

The phone call was from General Motors, informing Harder that the Town’s Edge GM franchise wouldn’t end in October after all.

Nor would those of about 20 other state GM dealerships, mostly in rural areas, that had been part of the beleaguered auto company’s nationwide dealership-purging plans last year.

What happened to alter GM’s plans was a combination of the auto company’s apparent blind spot regarding rural auto sales dynamics and 1,160 pink-slipped dealerships nationwide that fought back through arbitration.

Of those 1,160, GM is allowing 661 to keep their franchises.

Harder said GM was ill-advised to want to shutter its relationship with Town’s Edge in the first place.

In urban areas customers will spread their wealth — and shopping radius —  when it comes to car buying. That’s much less the case in rural areas where the customer base skews elderly and is reluctant to travel any distance to buy vehicles and have them serviced.

“Not to brag, but these people are loyal to the business, not the brand,” Harder says.

He says his older customers aren’t going to drive 50 miles to Mankato to buy a Chevy. They will, however — and GM probably gulped hard when it realized this — drive 10 miles to Windom to buy a Ford.

Town’s Edge is the only GM dealer in Cottonwood County, and Mountain Lake’s history of having a Chevrolet dealership since the 1930s will remain intact.

Next Friday, Town’s Edge will have its annual customer-appreciation open house, and what had been shaping up as a bittersweet affair will now simply be sweet. 

Good news in small towns not only travels fast, it’s shared in person.

Sales rep Roger Rahn says no sooner had he come in for work a couple of mornings ago than a half dozen or so people stopped by to offer congratulations.

In Detroit that’s not likely to happen. In small-town Minnesota, it would be surprising if it didn’t.



Brian Ojanpa is a Free Press staff writer. Call him at 344-6316 or e-mail bojanpa@mankatofreepress.com 

 

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