I know we probably say it every year about this time and sorry for being boring but things just aren’t the same! I visited a few showrooms on the 1st in the hope that all staff would be far too busy to have time for me and look incredulously at me whilst exclaiming “don’t you know it’s the 1st of September?!”
Well at the places I visited all the 6 60 plates had been delivered and the sales guys were flicking through a takeaway menu to order lunch after their underwhelming mornings work.
Without wishing to go back to the past I couldn’t help try and regale these fresh faced youngsters with tales of delivering 35 cars by 10am on the 1st and arriving at work at midnight in my quest to assist some eager buyers in getting their sparkling new cars on the road first.
I don’t know if they believed what I was saying but they could at least have pretended to enjoy my war stories, and although the reasons for the modern registration change system have been well documented it somehow dilutes the whole emotion which existed with customers having the new plate. In fact I now doubt many customers would even know what the new plate is such is the frequency with which they change and, of course that is exactly what the changes made over 10 years ago were designed for.
The slightly curious joy I also got from counting how many new plates I could spot during the course of the big day also seems less than worth it as I only saw about 20 and 8 of them were at a car showroom waiting to be collected!
I know it’s a little, how can I put this, trainspotterish but car ownership and the selling of new cars which go out on the roads in the new reg month are what break up the mundane nature of the trade today and by creating excitement for customers and making the experience feel special it is just basically much more fun. It often leads to the feelgood factor spreading and more customers coming in as a result.
Alas we will probably never go back to the ‘good old days’ so I will probably just write about them, so see you same time next year…sorry I mean March.
