Recession – 10 years on
As I write this, that open sewer in my living room is showing documentaries celebrating a decade since the collapse of the banking sector. While it has been 10 years for the country as a whole, its been 11 for us in the North East, due to the collapse of Northern Rock. That event was like flicking a light switch off for the regional economy. It was a standing joke in the region that people were joining the queues in the Northern Rock bank run to both appear on TV and to pretend to their neighbours that they had savings worth worrying about.
However, thanks to Auto Trader Digital still being a good sales tool back then, we continued to sell out stock across the country and even abroad. The first I knew that something was seriously amiss in the economy was at a fleet sale in Glasgow. The previous week had been manic, but now everything was eerily quiet, which I initially put down to the school half-term break.
At the sale, I was chuffed at having secured a three-door Fiesta TDCI in silver for well below ‘book’. The auctioneer caught me after the sale and offered me a transporter full of them for even less. They’d come in from Ireland but had been re-registered in the UK. I phoned my boss to clear writing such a big cheque, but I was more than game for the deal. I was selling these cars day and night. What’s more, you couldn’t buy them for love nor money. However, my boss had caught a chill that day when it came to my spending. I’m not sure what he’d seen or heard, but he wouldn’t let me buy anything else.
He was right. My Fiesta TDCI grew roots in the showroom as sales rapidly ground to a halt.
Sometime later, I was buying at a closed Vauxhall sale in Measham. All was going well until it was announced that you could only buy cars on immediately cleared funds. By then, I’d already bought a bargain nearly-new Astra auto, but I was only brandishing a chequebook. This was around the time that GM had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, so I suspect this was to blame for the ‘cash only’ ruling for the cars offered that day. It made for a difficult conversation both with my boss and the auction staff, although everyone understood.
As the recession deepened and sales got tighter, our workshop – previously going great guns – suffered a further blow by the government scrappage scheme. We found that good, loyal customers who religiously maintained their cars were the ones with savings that weren’t earning anything. Such is the law of unintended consequences: in our experience, it was the moneyed customers with really good cars who took advantage of the misguided government scheme.
In a triple blow, we lost customers for sales, we lost them for repairs and we lost their lovely swappers, needlessly scrapped when scrap itself was worthless. By now, I could see my job was on borrowed time, so I took an offer from a car manufacturer to assist dealers and root out warranty fraud – poacher turned gamekeeper, so to speak. At least until the economy picked up again.
“My Fiesta TDCI grew roots in the showroom”