I rented a Hyundai.<\/p>\n
They pulled up this eggplant colored piece of shit, with the Coke-bottle flairs over the rear wheels, and I winced.\u00c2\u00a0 A Hyundai?\u00c2\u00a0 Wasn’t there anything else?<\/p>\n
This was it.\u00c2\u00a0 We’d already waited in line for twenty minutes at Enterprise.\u00c2\u00a0 This had just come in.\u00c2\u00a0 Had just been cleaned.\u00c2\u00a0 There were no other cars.<\/p>\n
So I got behind the wheel and took off down the expressway.<\/p>\n
A thousand miles later, dropping off the car in downtown Boston, I regretted parting with it.\u00c2\u00a0 I debated making an offer for the automobile right there.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d become enamored of its purple color, had bonded with this machine with absolutely no rattles, great sound insulation, decent handling and phenomenal gas mileage.<\/p>\n
That’s right, a Hyundai.<\/p>\n
I remember the early nineties, when Eileen bought one.\u00c2\u00a0 For less than $5000.\u00c2\u00a0 A true POS.\u00c2\u00a0 With a carburetor after everybody had switched to fuel-injection.\u00c2\u00a0 This rickety machine truly decomposed on the go.\u00c2\u00a0 Parts were always falling off.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a wonder she could drive it to the junkyard.\u00c2\u00a0 Where it went, when its value had been used up, but long before the death of other cars born that year.<\/p>\n
And when people started showing up in Santa Fes a decade and a half later, I thought they were just too cheap to buy a CR-V.\u00c2\u00a0 Or a RAV4.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s how I knew someone was a cheapskate, if they bought a Hyundai.\u00c2\u00a0 A Korean car?<\/p>\n
But that was before Samsung became the new Sony.\u00c2\u00a0 Before everything we thought we knew turned out to be wrong.<\/p>\n
I drove BMWs for thirty plus years.\u00c2\u00a0 They are the ultimate driving machines, or one of them, but not only are repairs ultra-expensive, they’re frequent.\u00c2\u00a0 The purchase price is just the starting price.\u00c2\u00a0 Budget thousands a year just for maintenance.\u00c2\u00a0 And, if you read the car magazines, you’ll see that they’ve had numerous problems with their BMW test cars, like engines seizing up.\u00c2\u00a0 As for Mercedes…\u00c2\u00a0 Great car, but they don’t handle like a BMW.\u00c2\u00a0 And if you’re not looking for that handling finesse, maybe you should consider a…Hyundai?<\/p>\n
Happened to me again in Denver.\u00c2\u00a0 Enterprise once again.\u00c2\u00a0 They were going to give us an HHR.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d rented a Malibu, not bad, but I’m not gonna drive around Colorado in this miniaturized imitation panel truck from the thirties.\u00c2\u00a0 No fucking way.\u00c2\u00a0 Didn’t they have anything else?<\/p>\n
The clerk winked and said he could offer us a Hyundai…<\/p>\n
SOLD!<\/p>\n
That Sonata was smaller than the Azera I’d rented the previous fall, but just as lovable.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m telling you, if my present car got totaled this afternoon, I’d buy a Hyundai.\u00c2\u00a0 Why waste all that extra money on a shinier nameplate?\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just a car.\u00c2\u00a0 And, unlike its American counterparts, Hyundai is more than a car, it’s like a pet, it’s adoptable, you fall in love.<\/p>\n
I mention all this because my eyes bugged out when I read the sales reports.\u00c2\u00a0 Yup, Cash For Clunkers ended, and sales swooned.\u00c2\u00a0 The right wingers thought the program was a disaster, everybody worried about the future.\u00c2\u00a0 You see GM’s sales dropped 45% from September 2009.\u00c2\u00a0 Chrysler was down 42.1%.\u00c2\u00a0 The Japanese superstars?\u00c2\u00a0 Toyota fell 12.6%.\u00c2\u00a0 And Honda 20.1%.\u00c2\u00a0 Granted, Ford only dropped 5.1%, and that’s good, but in the entire top ten, only three automakers showed increases.\u00c2\u00a0 The aforementioned BMW showed a slight uptick, of 3.6%.\u00c2\u00a0 But the fifth largest automaker,\u00c2\u00a0 Hyundai, sold 31,511 vehicles, a whopping 27.2% INCREASE!\u00c2\u00a0 And its Korean brother, Kia, sold 21,623 autos, a 24.4% increase!\u00c2\u00a0 HOLY SHIT!<\/p>\n
Seems the brand is no longer tarnished.\u00c2\u00a0 People don’t think twice about buying a Hyundai.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 They want something good, at a fair price, and they’re flocking to the Korean manufacturers.<\/p>\n
What this means is it’s never too late for the music industry to regain the hearts and minds of the consumer.\u00c2\u00a0 But it must offer good products at fair prices.<\/p>\n
Instead, the labels have been like GM.\u00c2\u00a0 Help us out!\u00c2\u00a0 Do something about file-trading!\u00c2\u00a0 Meanwhile, the consumer doesn’t want this overpriced Top Forty beat-driven crap.\u00c2\u00a0 Not in quantity.<\/p>\n
And concert tickets?\u00c2\u00a0 I’d say they’re at Mercedes-Benz level prices, but they’re more akin to the numbers for Ferrari, or Rolls Royce. Maybe U2 and the Eagles can command such high prices, but most people can’t afford them.\u00c2\u00a0 And buying a concert ticket is worse than buying a car.\u00c2\u00a0 With the Internet, you can now comparison shop for automobiles.\u00c2\u00a0 The dreaded sales manager routine, the endless rip-off negotiation, has been to a great degree decimated.\u00c2\u00a0 But who knows what the price of a concert ticket will be until you click through to the final Ticketmaster page.\u00c2\u00a0 The add-ons are like undercoating and floor mats, shit you don’t want that they insist you buy.<\/p>\n
And I don’t want to hear one more motherfucker say that lowering prices devalues the product, not fucking one.\u00c2\u00a0 People aren’t resisting Hyundais because they’re too inexpensive.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, now Hyundai is marketing the Genesis, an almost as good Lexus\/Acura\/Infiniti for almost ten grand less.<\/p>\n
This is the era of value.\u00c2\u00a0 Rather than insist that the customer come up to your price point, come down to his.\u00c2\u00a0 Meet him halfway.\u00c2\u00a0 Show that there’s a partnership, the same way Hyundai agreed to let you return your car if you lost your job.\u00c2\u00a0 An idea so good, other manufacturers imitated it.<\/p>\n
People are hurting.\u00c2\u00a0 They want entertainment.\u00c2\u00a0 But they feel priced out by the music industry.\u00c2\u00a0 And they’re sick of being fucked in the ass. Time to rebuild.<\/p>\n
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I rented a Hyundai. They pulled up this eggplant colored piece of shit, with the Coke-bottle flairs over the rear wheels, and I winced.\u00c2\u00a0 A Hyundai?\u00c2\u00a0 Wasn’t there anything else? This was it.\u00c2\u00a0 We’d already waited in line for twenty minutes at Enterprise.\u00c2\u00a0 This had just come in.\u00c2\u00a0 Had just been cleaned.\u00c2\u00a0 There were no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s96vPs-value","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2305"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2306,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2305\/revisions\/2306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}