tractor ride

An annual tractor ride in my town is tommarow. I work at a
local tractor dealership. Its been a john deere dealership for
50 years but john deere pulled the dealer license this
summer. Its kinda sad growing up in the area and seeing
them pull out after the same family that started the business
in 1961 is still running it today. Now they took on the
mccormick line of tractors and i will be taking a new 125
horse mccormick to the tractor ride tommarow. It should be
fun and ill post some pics

I think JD company is making a big mistake in doing this to dealers and the towns that have made them the company they are today. I for one will remember this when times are hard in the future.

It's especially sad when Deere & Company has a wide line of products and could redefine some of their Dealers and allow them to continue on in another form. I worked for a Recreational Vehicle Dealer about 27 years ago. They were the 3rd company to sign on as a Holiday Rambler dealer, but lost the franchise about two years before I went to work for them. The reason was my employer wasn't big enough and didn't want to carry and inventory one of each of their models. They were with Holiday Rambler for 30 years and never inventoried motor homes, they did sell a few customer ordered units over the years and we provided coach only service to HRC and other motor homes. The man that owned the business didn't want to expand the shop and his labor force enough to service motor coach drivelines and wasn't comfortable selling units that he couldn't fully service. A year later Holiday Rambler was sold to Harley Davidson and about 10 years later it was sold again to Monoco Coach that eventually went bankrupt with the assets later acquired by Navistar. My employer was handling some other brands of trailers and only lasted a few more years before they sold out to a competitor that was had picked up the HRC franchise

Buy the way the door swings two ways, the folks I used to buy parts for our Farmalls from are now a John Deere Dealer. They were a full line IH dealer selling tractors, implements and trucks. Brother in Law retired and moved back to Michigan from California, we went to visit them and son of a gun- different color tractors and signs at the implement dealer. Most of the John Deere dealers I used as a kids are no longer.

They have a bunch of people who have MBAs in business management ,who only look at the money. We used to have a Massey, Allis Chalmers,Case,IH and IH trucks plus two JD dealers in the county and now we have none. We also had all three of the Big three autos too, all gone. So now when I need a part, or car, or piece of equipment, I buy only for price, and it is the manufacturer's fault.

Around here we still have two CASE IH, two AGCO, and two JD dealers that I can think of.

In fact, we had a third AGCO dealer, but they recently switched over and became CASE IH...

John Deere in Britain is chopping out dealers most months - they want around 14 to service the whole of Britain!!! Many have been JD since the early 1970's when JD first established a base here.

Massey Ferguson are now doing the same.

Not enough bad things can happen to the low life mother deere, for cutting the legs out from under these smaller dealers. Good for your outfit for having the fortitude to rise above the JD buttholes and moving on.

Hope you have a great day and I'm looking forward to the pix.

I don't like this trend either, I would much rather have deal with the smaller independent dealers with knowledgeable staff than these mega dealers. We used to have 3 different Deere dealers, within 20 miles, now they are all owned by one mega dealer. Another dealer has 8 Kansas locations and if given there way would be the only CIH/ NH dealer in the state. I miss the days of smaller dealers, it was much more fun to look at and purchase equipment. The parts man knew his stuff and you didn't make 3 trips to order, pickup and exchange parts.

I have a friend who is a Case-IH dealer. They have three stores now in three different towns. He really didn't want the other stores but he had to do it to stay in business. His Grandfather started the business in 1933 and he took it over from his father in the 70's. They have a big salvage yard and sell a lot of parts and equipment over the internet. The salvage yard has kept them going when equipment sales were slow.