Drive Is On at the Mall : Cars: Westminster store touts vehicles in a sales-free zone. It’s an experiment that’s being tested across the U.S.
It’s 2 p.m. on a hot Thursday in September and the mall is fresh-scrubbed following the annual attack of back-to-school shoppers.
At many stores, shopkeepers are polishing countertops and freshening displays, but Vida Louise and Bea Goetz are busy with a sudden flood of customers. The 30-by-100-foot store on the second level of the Westminster Mall is jammed as Goetz, Louise and 11 customers quickstep around the stock that fills the place.
Cars take up a lot more room than shirts and dresses, and it is cars that the two women are showing.
Louise and Goetz don’t sell autos at the Saturn of Westminster Mall store. No one does. Instead, owner John Campbell has staffed his 3-year-old shop with “product information specialists.” They just tell people all about Saturns in the hope that some of them will go to one of Campbell’s three Saturn dealerships in Orange County to buy a car.
While still an experiment, car stores in malls seem to be doing well. Campbell and other dealers who have them say the mall stores generate enough sales each month to be small profit centers.
“This industry is funny,” Campbell muses. Car dealers don’t like to be called retailers, he says, “so we cluster in our auto malls with so many makes and so many models all jammed together that we confuse people. But what we do, finally, is sell a product to consumers.” And what better place to sell than in the retail malls that dot America like dandelions in an unkempt lawn.
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Only a few car stores like Saturn of Westminster Mall are out there right now, and the National Automobile Dealers Assn. says there’s no discernible groundswell of support for such a radical idea. But dealers who have opened retail mall car shops say they pay off handsomely because they expose the dealership and its cars to thousands of people a week.
The Westminster store displays three or four models and keeps several others in the parking lot for test drives. But it sends customers to other Campbell dealerships when they are ready to buy. The store generates an average of 20 sales a month for Campbell’s nearby Saturn of Huntington Beach, a few at the Santa Ana store and brings in a sale once in awhile at Campbell’s San Juan Capistrano location, he says.
Numbers like that have helped persuade at least one auto maker to take to the malls of America. Chrysler Corp. launched a test program for its Plymouth division at malls in Portland and Milwaukee in January in hopes that the extra exposure would help jump-start Plymouth’s flagging sales. Two Plymouth Place stores opened last week in San Diego.
Chrysler spokesman Michael Rosenau says the Plymouth Place mall shops have been wildly successful. While Plymouth sales are down 31% nationally, they are up about 25% in Milwaukee and Portland. “We’ve done some extra advertising to tell people in those areas about Plymouth Place,” he said, but that and the presence of the stores appear to be the only reasons sales have taken off.
At the Plymouth mall shops--temporary display areas that are moved every three months to other shopping centers in the same community--representatives hand out literature, answer questions and help shoppers use a computer program coupled to a touch-sensitive TV screen to create the Plymouth that meets all of their needs. Employees don’t sell cars, referring interested shoppers instead to area Plymouth dealers. Rosenau says customer feedback shows that shoppers appreciate the no-pressure approach.
In addition to the San Diego stores, Chrysler has opened Plymouth Places at malls in New York, Washington, Baltimore, St. Louis and Dallas in recent weeks.
“We’re now in serious testing for a national rollout [of Plymouth Places] to begin next year,” Rosenau said.
Ford Motor Co.’s California region will try a modified mall approach to accompany the rollout next month of the restyled 1996 Taurus. The cars will be displayed for a weekend or so in each of a dozen Southern California malls. Still, Ford is chasing the same goal, said spokesman Dave Adkin--exposure without the confrontational atmosphere that often exists in a dealership where commission-driven sales agents are pushing to make an immediate sale.
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So far, most retail mall car stores are operated by Saturn dealers because the General Motors division is a relatively new operation that has broken a lot of the rules that still bind other dealers.
Saturn dealers get relatively large exclusive territories and don’t have to worry about stepping on competitors’ toes. Santa Ana-based Campbell Automotive Group, for instance, has exclusive Saturn rights to all of Orange County. In contrast, Campbell’s Ford dealership in Garden Grove competes with 11 other Ford dealers in the county.
Opening a store in a mall is out of the question for most dealers because franchise agreements limit territories and require more facilities for a showroom than most malls could provide. “It almost certainly would require approval of the factory and most of the dealer’s competitors,” said Mark Rikess, a Los Angeles-based auto dealership marketing consultant.
Saturn dealers who have other franchises say they would open mall shops for their other brands, but restrictions in their franchise agreements make it difficult if not impossible to do so.
“The exposure is invaluable,” says Liard Mooney, general manager of Saturn of Kearny Mesa, in San Diego. The dealership is one of four Saturn shops owned by McLean Automotive Inc., and three of them have small retail mall stores that, like the Campbell operation in Orange County, provide shoppers with information but send them to the regular dealerships to buy. McLean also owns a Buick dealership and a GMC truck dealership in San Diego County, “and we’d put both of them into malls if we could,” Mooney said.
Campbell likens his Westminster Mall store to an interactive billboard that lets prospective customers see and touch the products, ask questions and get answers and spend as much time as they like in an pressure-free atmosphere.
Industry studies show that only about 2% of the population is in the market for a car at any given time, “but if they keep seeing us every time they go to the mall,” Campbell says, “then the ones who aren’t in the market right now will have us on their minds when they do get ready to buy.”
Michael Schultz, general sales manager at Saturn of Bloomington, in Minnesota, is a believer. He says a 2-year-old retail store in downtown Minneapolis’ Skyway shopping area has opened up a whole new market. “It is giving us a customer base among the high-earning young professionals who work downtown” and don’t venture out into the suburbs, he said.
The store--called Saturn of Minneapolis/Downtown--differs from most of the mall car shops because it is staffed with sales agents who do deals right there. “About 40 sales a month,” Schultz says.
Campbell used to sell from his Westminster Mall store, but stopped last year. It was too expensive to keep sales managers and finance specialists at the small shop, he says, and “customers who bought there felt like orphans when they needed service because they had to take their cars to one of our other dealerships, where they didn’t know anyone.”
Campbell, whose Orange County Saturn territory has room for several more full-service dealerships, says he also expects to start a few more mall stores.
Last week, Libby Owens and her daughter, Marie, stopped by Saturn of Westminster Mall during a shopping trip and liked what they saw--and what they didn’t hear.
“We’ve been looking for cars because Marie’s heading off for college,” Owens said, “so we’ve been to a few dealers lately, and there was no pressure here to buy right now. This is a great idea.”
