The Hard Times Haven’t Broken Used-Car Dealer, but He’s Bruised

Up front, Vic Teresinski wants everyone to know he’s not starving because of the recession. Far from it.

“This isn’t one of those ‘ain’t-it-a-shame’ stories” is how the plain-spoken owner of Vic’s Auto Sales in Lawndale puts it.

Sure, he says, business is off 35% or so from a year ago, and finding used cars to sell has been a struggle, what with no one buying new cars and new-car dealers hanging on to whatever trade-ins they get.

Still, Teresinski is open for business on Hawthorne Boulevard--”the Boulevard,” he calls it. He and his wife, Beverly, also have their home of 20 years in Rancho Palos Verdes. They don’t take as many trips to Las Vegas as they used to, but they still go. And if an appliance breaks or they need to buy something new for the home or business, they do, Teresinski says.

“My TV conked out a while back, so I went out and bought a new big screen,” Teresinski says. “If my refrigerator went out, I’d buy another.”

But if Teresinski has not been broken by the hard economic times, he admits that he has been bruised. And day after day for the last year, he says, he’s had to make some concessions to the recession.

“It’s been pretty tough,” he says, putting out a cigarette in an ashtray filled with butts. “I mean, you can’t sell from an empty shelf.”

In the last year, Teresinski says, he’s made about $60,000--good money, to be sure, but $15,000 or so less than he’d be making if the economy weren’t sputtering.

With less income, Teresinski has had no choice but to cut costs. So within the next month, when the lease expires on the smaller of his two lots on the Boulevard, Teresinski will close the lot and move all of his cars to his newer location near the intersection with 154th Street.

The move, he says, will save $2,500 a month.

With only one salesman on his payroll--Teresinski himself works seven days a week--there isn’t much more he can do to trim business expenses.

But he and his wife, he says, have decided to put off buying a condominium in Mammoth Lakes that they were eyeing for awhile. And that will avoid an additional $950 a month in mortgage payments.

“I don’t need the pressure,” he says.

After 27 years in the car business, Teresinski says he isn’t about to retire. Not now, anyway. Not because of the economy.

But the recession, he says, does have him hunkering down, largely because he’s convinced that business will be slow for awhile, maybe a year or so.

“This is the craziest recession I’ve ever been through,” Teresinski says. “We’ll have one guy come in who doesn’t have a hope of buying a car . . . and then we’ll have a guy come in with $5,000 or $6,000 in his pocket.”

To be sure, Teresinski says, “a lot of people are hurting” in the current economy. But plenty of others, he says, are just not spending what they have on cars. “It’s not just a question of ‘can’t,’ ” he says. “It’s a question of not wanting to.”

The situation isn’t peculiar to Vic’s Auto. Used cars, new cars--almost all cars, it seems, are harder to sell nowadays, according to Teresinski and other South Bay car dealers recently interviewed. And, they say, it’s been that way for a year.

“Everybody says the (Persian Gulf) War was the beginning of the recession. Baloney,” Teresinski says. “People were already bummed out and just not buying anything.”

These days, he says, selling used cars is tough, but not as tough as just finding them to sell. “Normally, I’d have 65 cars between the two lots. Right now, I probably have 38 or 39. And I have money in the bank to buy my normal inventory . . . but the cars aren’t there,” he says.

Like other used-car dealers, Teresinski says his business has been hurt by several factors peculiar to this recession and resulting, in large part, from the buying sprees of the last decade.

For one thing, he says, plenty of new cars were sold in the late 1980s, so many people just aren’t in the market for another car. Period.

“This particular recession has been particularly hard on us because so many new cars were sold in the last five years,” Teresinski says. “A lot of people who went through the credit binge in the ‘80s, who bought and bought and bought, have been taken off the market. They paid so much for their cars, so many of them, that they are buried” in payments.

For those who are in the market, Teresinski says, sales are often harder to make, primarily because it’s tough finding enough good cars to draw plenty of customers.

“What it amounts to is the new-car sales are really down and the trade-ins have diminished. And new-car dealers are keeping a lot of the cars they would normally sell to a dealer like myself,” he says.

“I know of a Honda dealer right now that has an ’83 Toyota Corolla with 135,000 miles on it,” Teresinski says, “and he’s retailing it!”

The new-car dealers, he knows, have to hang on to used cars--even those they used to unload--just to lure customers onto the lot. “They have to have some revenue coming in, so they’re doing more used-car sales,” Teresinski says.

That has clearly hurt his business, but after spending half his life selling used cars, Teresinski says he’ll continue hunting for vehicles, cutting his costs and cutting his profits.

He’ll do, he says, whatever it takes to stay in the business he loves.

“When I was a kid, my dad was a mechanic, and while he was working, I’d go out to the car dealerships and talk to the salesmen,” Teresinski says. “And if somebody would have said to me, ‘Would you like to sell used cars or be president of the United States?’ I’d have said, ‘I’d rather be a salesman.’ ”

That feeling, he says, has never changed.

“I still like the car business,” he says, waiting for a customer.