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November 21, 2016
www.usedcarnews.com
Competition Grows Among Dealer Groups
REVVING UP: CarMax is hiring for a range of positions, inlcuding automotive service professionals. The company is ramping up hiring as it adds stores and competes with the growing number of dedicated used-car operations from publicly traded franchise groups.
By Ted Craig
CarMax Inc. continues to expand at a strong pace while its competition grows. The used-car superstore chain recently unveiled plans to build its largest multi-purpose facility. The 35-acre property located in Murrieta, Calif., will serve as a reconditioning hub that will feed inventory to several of the company’s stores in southern California. The location will also house CarMax’s first four-lane auction facility on the West Coast. In addition to production and auction services, the facility will
have a separate building for selling used cars to the general public. The location has the capacity to stock up to 400 vehicles at a time. CarMax is now hiring more than 250 associates to staff this location, which is the company’s largest hiring effort for one location to date. The store is scheduled to open in February 2017. CarMax will open another new Los Angeles area store in Palmdale in February where the company will hire an additional 60 associates. In addition, CarMax is recruiting for 2,500 positions in locations across the country. Of those, more than 1,200 positions are for auto-
motive service careers. CarMax also opened a store in Daytona, Fla., last month. All of this comes after AutoNation Inc. announced plans to get back in the used-car superstore business and Sonic Automotive Group Inc. announced it will continue to add Echo Park stores in several markets. AutoNation has identified 25 AutoNation USA potential sites in its existing markets, of which five are expected to open in 2017. The stores will give consumers the chance to buy AutoNation certified vehicles and have them serviced at any AutoNation location, including its franchise stores.
AutoNation will follow the same sales philosophy as CarMax, with no-haggle pricing and non-commissioned salespeople. AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson said the used-car stores are a response to the cyclical nature of new-car sales. “We need a strategy that allows us to take our destiny in our hands,� Jackson said. AutoNation had started out as a used-car-only company, like CarMax, but abandoned that strategy in 1999 when he closed all its standalone used-car stores over the course of the next year. Continued on page 10
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