In the past, dealers changed very little in regards to our operations: we opened and closed the same time, and it rarely changed. Maybe we decided to open an hour earlier or close on Sundays, but as a norm changes were infrequent. With Covid, that has gone by the wayside.
We’ve changed hours at our stores every couple of weeks since Covid hit. We are pretty good at making these changes – you first change your website, then your Google My Business page, then Facebook, then the manufacturer’s site, then Yelp, Bing, etc… It’s amazing how many places our dealer info and hours are posted online, but you figure out a process and you handle it. Nothing is more frustrating than checking a website or a GMB page which has incorrect info. And with Covid, it has gotten a lot worse for many a local business.
If you are careful and check out our websites or our listings pages, you can be confident in the info you see. The trouble is that there are so many places across the internet where dealer info is posted, and many of these sites have harvested our info without our acknowledgement. A quick check of DealerRater or Cars.com finds incorrect hours, store names, and addresses for example. These sites list cars well, but their attention to detail on basic dealer info is sorely lacking.
The best thing to do is stick to a dealer’s website or Google My Business listing – that’s the info you can trust.