Dealer's Choice

Dealer’s Choice

- Jamie Kitman

THE SHIMMERING SAGE OF THE Showroom, this magazine’s old friend, Sheldon Sandler—a former Wall Street CPA turned broker of huge car dealership sales—recently invited us to a fancy golf club in affluent Princeton,New Jersey, where his company, Bel Air Partners, hosted a conference on the future of the dealership. Attendees were prosperous car dealers, respected industry analysts, and even the president of a major auto company’s finance arm. So yeah, I went.

As someone who does most of his thinking about cars and the industries that make and support them from behind the wheel of a car, a day spent with Sandler and friends was going to be an education of sorts for me. Car dealers live where the rubber meets the bank account and the consumer credit dyno cum merry-go-round; they ought to know exactly what’s going on with the car market.

And they do, barring the fact that except for the certainty of more SUVs, no one really knows where it’s headed or when it will get there—especially given today’s mad dash to autonomous cars. Add to this the profound sense of moment in the air, seeing as the presidential election was only a few weeks past and the Trumpazoic Era was just beginning. The perception of radical change, of history being imminently made, hung over the room. The crowd (older, rich, white, overwhelmingly male, and fundamentally Republican) was a little bit excited, some more boisterously so than others.

Because attendees signed up for a symposium and not a media opportunity, I won’t identify anyone by name. This is not to imply there was anything shameful going on, just some folks thinking out loud about how they were going to be making more money in the years to come.