Nostalgia out at auto dealerships

BRAND NEW LOOK: C. Bradford Scott, general manager of Scott Volkswagen in East Providence, in the new Taunton Avenue showroom. / PBN FILE PHOTO/DAVID LEVESQUE
BRAND NEW LOOK: C. Bradford Scott, general manager of Scott Volkswagen in East Providence, in the new Taunton Avenue showroom. / PBN FILE PHOTO/DAVID LEVESQUE

The carpet in the old Saccucci Honda dealership on West Main Road in Middletown gave the space a lived-in ambiance that dated back to the days when it was OK to smoke in the showroom. Today’s brand-conscious international car manufacturers, however, have little use for hominess or mid-20th century nostalgia.
So when the Saccucci family sold the Lincoln Mercury portion of the dealership in 2008 and became solely affiliated with Honda, they knew it wouldn’t be long before they had to change the dealership’s look. “They want the brand to be represented in a uniform way,” co-owner Carol Saccucci said about Honda. “We had not done anything since 1968, and you are strongly encouraged to upgrade. We got the point.”
So Saccucci Honda embarked on a $3 million renovation project to transform its traditional family dealership into the latest version of Honda’s standardized showroom designs, Generation 3.
It’s the kind of transformation that’s happening on auto-miles across Rhode Island and the country as manufacturers exert increasing leverage on dealership owners to upgrade their facilities while adopting a standardized and branded design.
For some, trading in a sometimes-cramped and threadbare, old building for the cutting edge in retail and service department design can’t come soon enough. Others are less than thrilled to spend millions of dollars replacing their trusted home with one that will be replicated on commercial strips from coast to coast.
“A lot depends on their circumstances,” said Jack Perkins, executive vice president of the Rhode Island Automobile Dealers Association, about the push to renovate. “Dealers are independent businesspeople. They have an agreement with the manufacturer to sell their products, and the manufacturers have requirements. One of them is to have an adequate facility. Of course, there are a lot of ways to define ‘adequate’ facility.”
How dealers feel about being prodded to build a new dealership, which usually includes a new service center and offices as well as a showroom, often depends on factors such as their current cash position and when the last time was they put money into the building, as well as their design sense.
“If someone has a facility that is older and out of date, then there is probably some recognition that [they] need to do something,” Perkins said. “But if someone has a newer facility, then they may be reluctant to do a complete renovation when one was just done.” Along with slick, new buildings, manufacturers also prefer exclusivity, having their brand appear alone in each showroom instead of mixed and matched with other manufacturers as used to be common.
Saccucci Honda had been in business for nearly 30 years before Honda, a Japanese upstart known for motorcycles, started trying to get into Rhode Island showrooms that already featured American brands.
By the 2000s, both Lincoln and Honda were looking for exclusivity.
“All companies have gotten to the point where they want their own dealers – “Lincoln Mercury was saying the same thing to us,” Saccucci said. “It’s not like it was back in 1976 when Honda approached my father. They were happy that we would sell their product at all.”
Sometimes, manufacturers’ suggestions for a particular dealership go beyond the state of a building and extend to the location of the dealership.
That was the case for Scott Volkswagen in East Providence, where the German car company thought an old showroom on Newport Avenue should be closer to other auto-sales traffic.
“They told us we needed a higher-visibility location,” said C. Bradford Scott, general manager of Scott Volkswagen, who declined to say what would have happened if he didn’t go along with it.
“We were strongly encouraged,” Scott said.
The result of that encouragement is a new, 24,000-square-foot showroom on Taunton Avenue that doubled the size of the 1960s-era Newport Avenue space.
Like other new facilities, the new Scott Volkswagen has a clean design intended to focus the image of the vehicles for passing drivers in large, white-framed windows.
As is the case with most new showrooms, Volkswagen didn’t help with the cost of building the new facility, although it did lend its designers to work with Scott’s architects.
“It’s beautiful compared with the old space, very clean, modern,” Scott said. “We spent a lot of years in the old space, but it is nice to be in a bigger place with room to grow.”
The move toward standardized showrooms first became noticeable in the 1990s and has accelerated since then.
In addition to Scott and Saccucci, in Rhode Island in the past year established dealers that have upgraded existing showrooms include Tarbox Toyota in North Kingstown and Paul Masse Buick in South Kingstown. Scott said most manufacturers usually come out with a new showroom design every few years, but dealers are not asked to adopt every change and are generally alright as long as they look like they are in the right decade.
In addition to marketing, dealership consolidation also plays a part in shaping the dealership landscape.
This was evident during the recent General Motors and Chrysler bankruptcies, in which both companies had the chance to unilaterally terminate dealer agreements as part of their restructurings.
The new Paul Masse Buick in South Kingstown is in the same location as another dealership that was closed by GM during bankruptcy.
While a number of factors played into the decisions of which showrooms were eventually shut, dealers with old facilities probably didn’t have an advantage.
“With the reduction in dealers in recent years and General Motors discontinuing brands, there seems to be more interest now for manufacturers in feeling like they have the right number of dealers and having the right image out there,” Perkins of the auto-dealers association said. “But it’s not fair to make [dealers] build a whole new facility just because someone woke up and said ‘I have a new design.’ ”
At Middletown’s Saccucci Honda, where before there was carpet, soon there will be sleek, polished surfaces more reminiscent of an Apple store than an old car lot. There will also be a drive-through showroom, technology center and children’s play area.
Following the latest retail concepts, desks in the showroom will no longer belong to individual salespeople, their papers and personal effects, but instead be common spaces used solely for closing deals with customers.
Saccucci admitted there was some sadness when crews started tearing apart the old showroom. (Salespeople are working out of trailers while workers prepare the new showroom to open, hopefully by the end of March.)
“It was like watching your home come down,” Saccucci said. “I must confess that I will miss having a unique building. Hopefully we can take a little of the homey feel and add it to the new technology.” •

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