Fitzgerald: 'No haggle' pricing philosophy sets a standard

For veteran dealer and industry advocate Jack Fitzgerald, a change in his stores' pricing philosophy started with a cash-starved automaker and a tent.

It was 1979, when Chrysler Corp. faced its first brush with bankruptcy and the financially troubled automaker launched national tent sales across its dealership network to try to stay afloat and reduce its inventory.

"To be in the tent sale, the dealers had to put their rock-bottom price on the windshield of the car, and they had to sell it for that price," Fitzgerald told Automotive News this month.

Fitzgerald — who founded Fitzgerald's Colonial Dodge in Bethesda, Md., in 1966, and had several Chrysler dealerships by 1979 — said sales at the time were "abysmal."

"We were desperate. We'd try anything, so we participated in the [tent] sale," he recalled. "We put the prices on the windshield — no haggle, no hassle — and I was amazed at how effective that was with consumers."

Chrysler later secured nearly $1.5 billion in loans from the federal government, and many of its dealers went back to the traditional way of selling vehicles.

But for Fitzgerald, no-haggle pricing was here to stay.

"It took us a few years, and we had a lot of resistance from our managers, actually more than the salespeople," he said, "but we persevered, and so we have a culture in our dealerships that supports it."

Fitzgerald doesn't mind ruffling feathers. He proudly advocated on behalf of rejected dealers during the 2009 bankruptcies of Chrysler and General Motors.

"It was wrong," he said of the automakers' actions to thin out their dealer footprints. "It was very, very wrong."

The Detroit automakers "were using dealers as an excuse for their problems," he added. "They'd say, 'We can't get the dealers to do this. We can't get the dealers to do that, and they cost us so much money.' "

Fitzgerald was one of three leaders of the Committee to Restore Dealer Rights, a rejected-dealer group that successfully led the fight in Congress for legislation to set up arbitrations for rejected Chrysler and General Motors stores.

He's also stood up for consumers. To help car buyers make informed decisions, Fitzgerald filmed videos for consumer groups such as the Florida Consumer Action Network and lobbied for disclosure of invoice prices.

"This is a very simple business, really. We sometimes tend to make it complicated, but it's not," he said. "Just take care of your customers, and take care of your people."