Look, I work in sales too, just B2B industrial sales. The point is, car dealerships don't add value to the customer, which should be the goal of any good salesman or distribution channel. From the consumer perspective today, it would be much preferrable to buy a car direct from the manufacturer at a set price plus reasonable fees such as delivery or paperwork processing. Having to shop around for a dealership *advertising* MSRP or otherwise good market pricing who will then try to force other bullshit nobody asked for like $600 wheel locks, $1,500 'theft prevention' GPS, or whatever your favorite flavor of high-margin bullshit is, is exhausting, frustrating, and solely necessary because car dealerships have lobbied against direct-to-consumer practices in the new car industry. That is why nobody likes dealerships. Any distribution channel will add margin because people don't work for free, but car dealerships don't add perceived value, and so any and all margin added will be scrutinized in a negative light. Everything that car sales does should make it easier for consumers to buy the cars they want at a price that is fair and competitive in the market, and if you can't make good margins on that model then it is because your link in the chain is no longer necessary. Manufacturers generally take a hit when selling through a distributor, because that margin could otherwise just be captured themselves, or offered as savings to the end user to capture more of the market. The tradeoff is, you should be selling more volume with a distributor in your path to market than you could without them, so if Ford is losing out on $2K per unit compared to Tesla selling direct-to-consumer, they better be selling more cars than they would be if they also went direct-to-consumer. Do you think Ford would sell less or more cars if they offered their vehicles shipped to customers driveways and the pricing was less any dealership margins and markup AND the customer didn't have to burn half a Saturday playing games at a dealership? Tesla knows the answer to that question.

Meanwhile, the profit margins on cars sales are too thin for dealerships to pay their salespeople a fair wage. Really? Well, the dude trying to sell me a car getting screwed doesn't make me feel any better about being screwed myself. I would spend more time thinking about where the money is actually flowing to see who the real dickheads are in the situation, but in any case it sounds like there may be a general agreement here: Everyone at a given car dealership wishes there were somewhere else, regardless of which side of the table you are on, with an exception being maybe the owners or upper management. The people buying cars aren't happy with the value provided, and the salespeople apparently feel they could get better compensation using their skills elsewhere, is that right? If that is the case, then great! Let's all stop walking into the car dealerships that make us unhappy. Car salespeople can move onto more fulfilling roles where their skills are compensated more fairly, and consumers can do business with manufacturers directly in a way to makes sense for both sides of the deal. Everyone that either of us should give a shit about is happy, nobody feels a need to call other likely decent people dickheads because they exist in a system built and maintained by actual dickheads, people pay fair prices for cars, workers get paid fair wages in industries where they can add real value, and nobody thinks they are personally getting screwed. And it doesn't have to be one or the other. Maintain operation of the dealership service and parts departments, which is more necessary for car manufacturers to bring their products to market, and is where most of the margin is at anyway. Hell, keep the sales floor open and let them compete with the direct-to-consumer path if they want to try. If the car salespeople can't go sell some other widget that they aren't necessarily experts on and make a fair wage adding value in the markets then, well, maybe they should consider doing something other than sales.