Its been said here this is to kiss the rump of big dealers. What big dealer is in Florida? In North Carolina?
If this was to kiss a dealer's rump it would be the trucks at Smyrna, Camp Shelby, in Pennsylvania or Virginia.
I am acquainted with some major dealers - including probably the biggest. 100 trucks a month from Florida to the dealer would require 50 truck loads, each round trip requiring at least two days. That means this would be more than the company truck could haul, even if there were no other pickups or deliveries to make. Contracted hauling is, for all practical purposes, as expensive for a dealer as it is for us. Several of the trucks recently offered at Blanding and LeJune personnally I would not have paid the freight on even if the truck itself was free.
I am sure that someone will bid on this contract - and get it - and the per unit price of the vehicles will probably be really low - but in the end it will be no more profitable for a dealer than buying them one at a time. And, one of the big dealers I am familiar with recently scrapped out over a hundred deuces - because there simply isn't much of a commercial market for trucks that small (compared to a five ton).
Rather than being driven by some sort of conspiracy to please big dealers (remember, simply put, why if GL pisses off Memphis, Clark, etc......what are the pissed off customers gonna do....start shopping at Wal Mart for trucks? - seirously, GL is virtually a legal monopoly)....I see this as being driven by the end of the line for the deuces, and the middle of the end of 800 series trucks. There are simply more trucks coming out of the system than DRMS, DRMO and GL can handle.
DD
