I work at a new car dealership and during a conversation between some of the people in the service department and our general manager, buying cars as employees came up during the talk.
I have been employed at this dealership for 9 years and during that time there has been no thoughts about repercussions if I were to go to another brand/dealer to buy a car. With how crazy the turnover rate is in dealerships, the GM in this story has only been with us for around 2 years.
While talking at the end of the night last night, the topic of buying cars came up, when it did our GM mentioned that if any of his employees were to go to another brand/dealership to buy a new car they would be pretty much fired on the spot.
One of our advisors brought up her possibly being interested in buying a new truck from Chevy since our brand doesn't offer full sized trucks. The GM's response was that we also owned a GMC dealership and that its “basically the same” so there is no reason to not buy from the company. Our other advisor mentioned the Civic Type R and the GM backpedaled and said that was fine since we don't offer something comparable.
Is it just me or is that an insane thing to essentially require your employees to spend tens of thousands of dollars inside the company wether you were wanting to buy that brand or not? Has anyone else had these kind of experiences with their dealership/company?