A 12 Volt Chain’s Pandemic Story

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Car Tunes Detroit in pandemic

What do you do when store traffic is overwhelming, you are running out of product and three employees quit?

This is how Car Tunes, Detroit with five stores, has weathered the pandemic.

During the sales peak this summer, customers would line up outside the shops’ doors with debit cards full of money, and they wanted the job done now.  “Actually, they wouldn’t even argue price as long as you could do it now. And if you couldn’t, they’d go to the next guy and the next guy and maybe you don’t see them again,” said owner of the 43-year old chain, Mark Constantakis. “And then there was a surge of online customers coming in with a radio from Amazon or an amplifier and they want you to put it in for them.  We couldn’t consider it. Our hands were full,” he said.

It wasn’t uncommon for 10 people to be waiting in a line outside the door, as the state allowed only two people in the shops at a time, given each location’s size.

It wasn’t that the phone would ring and then you’d hang up and it would ring again. All three lines would ring at once, repeatedly.

“This is what happens when you dump $2 trillion into the economy,” said Constantakis.  In the state of Michigan, often someone who applied for unemployment had to wait weeks about 5 weeks to get a check, and it would come in lump sum with back pay. Customers would come in with $4,000 on a debit card ready to buy.

The result was, during June and July, Car Tunes’ sales surged 73 percent over the same two months last year.  Sales have slowed from their mini boom, but they are still quite high for August, up by almost 30 percent thus far compared to August last year.

Car Tunes Detroit in Pandemic

During the first two months of the pandemic, Car Tunes was required to close as a non essential business as ordered by the Governor’s “stay at home” order.  But even missing revenue from those two months, sales are up 14 percent for the last four months, compared to 2019.

“Being forced to close because you’re in the 12 volt business …and watching marijuana stores and liquor stores stay open, people walking up and down the aisles of Walmart, CVS, Lowe’s, Home Depot was very upsetting.  It’s disturbing that someone would have the capricious ability to decide that booze is essential or a marijuana business that opened six months ago can stay open. Then coming out of that we went right into the boom with no product.  I was buying as much as I could get anywhere I could find it.  Then, the relentless pace of opening under the boomlet cost me some staff. Some left the industry. We are now back into critical staffing shortages, as is everyone else that I know in the business,” said Constantakis.

The shortages are rough, but the staffing shortage is worse.  “Even with the shortages, we couldn’t have done any more work” due to the shortage of installers, said Constantakis.

“When you are short-handed you are handicapped in decision making, how much to buy, scheduling issues, it ripples through every aspect of business,” he said.

“One of the interesting phenomena of this is if I go back to the period a year earlier, I submit that the people who left us were happy with the amount of money they were making and the work they were doing. But when you go into the boomlet period …there was an atmosphere of stress from additional workloads, and the stress caused by scheduling conflicts and other kinds of staffing needs. Those same people that were happy and satisfied with the money they were making before, even though they were making more during this period, were unhappy and left,” he said.

“On the inventory…we got caught in an amplifier pickle, a subwoofer pickle, and a speaker pickle. Some of them were at the same time where we’d have 200 of something on order and we’d get 12, if any at all.”  Some of the factories are starting to loosen up inventory although some still say October or November for better supply, he said.

Because of CDC rules, customers now drop off their cars, rather than waiting, something Constantakis thinks is better for the shop in the long run as the tech isn’t rushed because of someone waiting at the store.

The chain is currently booked out two to three weeks. It has 22 employees. Key lines include Pioneer, Alpine, Hertz/Audison, Kicker and JBL/Infinity.

 

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