Sheri

its worth fighting for 🌷

Writer of word both truth and tale. Video producer, editor, artist, still human. Hire me?

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Slowly making a visual novel called We Will Not See Heaven, demo is free. Sometimes I stream, or post adult things. Boys' love novel enthusiast. Take care, yeah?

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Sheri
@Sheri

the "inventor of car vending machines" Carvana is a used car dealership in the United States which is constantly fighting off lawsuits and barely skipping along fiscally. let's talk about it

Car vending machines?

imagine if office buildings were even more a waste of space than they currently are. carvana heard "build upward instead of outward to make a smaller footprint" and took that as a challenge rather than a guideline

Stack of cars in a glass tower in Denver. Photo taken in late Feb 2023 by Hyoung Chang for The Denver Post.

this particular Public Transportation "Alternative" was only populated with used cars as of a couple months ago, after months of not being sure if they'd even be able to afford it

(side-note: that 9news story is really well written and worth checking out on its own. sometimes, local reporting fuckin slaps)

anyways, those financial troubles are not unrelated to this business model.

Support center answer from Carvana about how their vending machines work. It reads: "How do Carvana's Car Vending Machines work? Our Carvana Vending Machine offers a one-of-a-kind experience. You will receive a coin to drop into the machine, which activates the car tower, dispensing your vehicle. Watch your vehicle descend into the delivery bay where your Customer Advocate will help you complete the purchase. You can learn more about the Carvana Car Vending Machine experience here."

it's cute and all; i love gumball machines! i carry change explicitly to get cute toys and bracelets from machines at the mall!

A Carvana token. It reads: "TOKEN, GOOD FOR YOUR CARVANA CAR."

and look look, you use a custom token to buy a car at their vending machine! isn't that neat? except, that's not how this works.

the cars inside the vending machine are already sold.

Photo from Business Wire of the Washington DC car vending machine.

again, those cars? you see in the glass there?

those are, largely, not for sale. they are cars that have already sold, and are just waiting for their customers to come and pick them up.

"Can I buy a car I see inside the Carvana Vending Machine?

The vehicles inside a Carvana Car Vending Machine are usually already sold to customers that will be coming to pick up their vehicles. However, we’d be happy to help you find a similar vehicle on our website that you can pick up at the Car Vending Machine during your appointment!"

-Carvana Vending Machine Q&A

this uh. kind of puts out the fire that is claiming carvana works like buying a can of soda from a vending machine.

and no, that's not me making up a quote.

that's the exact wording used by Core77 Design in their award announcement for Carvana. whatever the fuck "Notable Interaction Award" means

if i went up to a soda machine and tried to buy a Moxie, but was then told "actually, about 25 of the 26 available sodas are already sold, so you can buy Faygo or hey go". then uh. i wouldn't call that a vending machine. it's a display case for other people's purchases.

Quote from IndyStar article from late 2018. It reads: "Is it actually a vending machine?
Well, yes...and no. It's a seven-story glass tower that holds 26 already-claimed used cars awaiting pickup from people who bought them online. The buyers come to Carvana on an appointment basis, and pick up the car."

the intended user experience here is not to see a car in the giant metal and glass gachapon case and buy it, but to then go online to find a similar looking car, buy that instead, and wait for it to arrive at said monstrosity so you can pick it up with a funny lil token.

their reasoning?

Another quote from the IndyStar article, reading: "What's the point of the coin, if I can just get it delivered? 'It's just a fun experience,' Carvana spokeswoman Amy O'Hara said. 'We like to say we're making car-buying fun again.' "

a fun vending experience that costs millions of dollars to maintain. pretty bold for a company that has literally never turned a profit.

then again, they seem to have found some fun land leasing loopholes for themselves.

and of course there's also the condition of the cars themselves, just be patient! we'll get there, silly!

but first: in the event that these effigies to emissions are not in your area...

Buying a car online?

Picture from Chicago Business of a black car being unloaded from a Carvana tow truck.

assuming you don't have or want to interface with the glass nightmare in your neighborhood, carvana skips the step where they waste a lot of money driving a car into the funny little lot, and just drives it directly to you

or rather, allegedly underpays and overworks employees under mass surveillance to deliver you a car. i guess this is what happens when you're the kinda company to lay off thousands of employees, some of which over Zoom

now, i could be lazy and just point to examples of employees fucking up while delivering cars, like jalopnik here

Gif of a TikTok from user chrisdankers7, of a car sliding off the track and slamming into the pavement as the employee desperately tries to stop it.

but really, i kind of feel like delivering a thousand pound pile of metal and flammable material should be at least a two-person job, no?

by the way, scrolling down past the click-bait first blush of that jalopnik article that still finds a way to claim it's the employee's fault (you know, journalism!), they go on to mention that some of the issues the car had couldn't have been caused by a hard drop, and should have been fixed before the tiktoker bought it

Quotation from Jalopnik quoting Motor1: "…another clip... ...takes us under the hood while a narrator talks about alleged issues ranging from coolant leaks to bad power steering fluid and replacement body panels that were supposed to be swapped prior to shipping. Through video comments, we learn the car reportedly had just 10,000 miles on it when he purchased it through Carvana. From the sounds of it, the poor car hasn’t had it very easy despite the low mileage."

carvana is competing with itself to see which saves them more money: abusing their cars or their employees. and just like with the not-for-sale cars in the "vending machine", they offer a veneer of convenience to mask this business's unsustainable model

according to several former truck drivers for Carvana, the training and on-boarding process is very friendly. free lunches, pretty nice sounding health benefits, and a promise of "working your own hours"

and then the actual job starts.

"We are paid salary based on a 50 hour work week but we work way more. The driver loaders are few far and in between at the Heath IC so you’ll literally load/unload your truck by yourself 99% of the time which is time consuming."

"Some guys are coming into load their trucks around 09:00 for their noon runs, after driving round trip for the better part of 11 hours, then they spend the next two hours unloading. If you're new to vehicle transportation it may take you a little longer. Carvana talks about how you get salary but when you start to do the math, it just doesn't work out very well."

"The driver seniority system is tied to routes making it unbalanced for new drivers, a lot of turnover the top 10 drivers have nothing to complain about, Driver pay is different between markets which is unfair, trucks break down regularly, dispatch completely useless, No compensation when you do break down which is regularly..."

- Former Carvana Transporters on Simply Hired

imagine if your Uber driver had to also tow a $10,000 used honda civic, in the same time frame, with the same corporate structure. that's carvana.

wow! so much better than used car lots, right?

Used car lots are dying.

Evening picture of Certified Auto Outlet in Oneonta, New York. I used this pic because it's pretty.

oh shit.

you know how the big shift to electric cars is Pretty Okay for the environment, but pretty much unattainable for the lower-middle class?

well, consider: if the next big trend in vehicles in the states is going green, and electric cars are so expensive to manufacture, what will happen to the used car market?

NPR has the answer:

"Three years ago, when production lines started to slow, it affected both the new- and used-car markets immediately. Fewer new cars sent new prices up. That, in turn, pushed many shoppers into the used-car market. And more shoppers in the used market pushed prices up there, too.

But the new-car woes also had a delayed effect on the used-car market— because new cars, obviously, become used cars after some time.

So all those top-of-the line cars that were made in 2021 are now some very nice two-year-old cars, which means even in the used market, the high end of the market is booming.

Meanwhile, because automakers cut production of cheap, no-frill sedans, people looking for cheaper late-model used cars are now out of luck."

-Camila Domonoske for NPR, March 2023

later in the article, when interviewing used car dealership owners, one mentions he became licensed as a full auto dealer so he could buy cars "at auction"

wait, is that what carvana is doing?

Yes, that is exactly what Carvana is doing.

Picture from Wired of a car auction in Hayward, California.

carvana loves to tell you how much they want to buy your car. you'd assume this is so they can sustain an otherwise unsustainable business model, right?

no! the majority of their cars are from auction, not from trade-in or direct customer sales

and like- this is fine. this isn't by default a problem, i'd rather these cars be sold at auction then just go to a landfill or whatever. but these auctions are attended by licensed car dealers from all around the country who are fighting tooth-and-nail for cheap cars to turn a profit on

which is why carvana just bought out an auction house instead

TechCrunch article in early 2022 by Kirsten Korosec. The headline reads: "Carvana acquires Adesa US auction business for $2.2B to jump-start used car sales.

big moves for a company who, i cannot stress enough, has never turned a profit. especially what with all the

Lawsuits

Article from Auto Finance News by Amanda Harris in late 2022. The headlines reads: "Carvana hit with class action lawsuit". It continues "The complain alleges tilting issues and false statements."

why didn't anybody tell me it's a crime to lie to customers and shareholders about your product? who would've thought??

here's some of the accusations slated against Carvana across their, several lawsuits:

as it turns out, walking to a used car dealership, physically inspecting a car, and then choosing if you want to buy it has its advantages. at least then if it was stolen, you can go to the physical location with a baseball bat and demand a refund. it's a lot harder when it's an online business.

harder still when the company is broke.

Again, Carvana has NEVER turned a profit.

Chart from The Verge showing quarterly profits from Carvana. Going as far back as Q1 2021.

and like, this will sound crazy, but this isn't uncommon for "successful" companies. valuation and projections spurred by venture capital allow businesses that have never, ever turned a profit to continue to operate and still be major names in the scene

the problem is, the business of "buying cars and selling them at an upcharge" really shouldn't be hard to make a profit in- again, there are other factors at play we addressed earlier, but if you're able literally buy the auction house, how is it you aren't turning a profit yet?

well, maybe things will get easier soon? i can't predict the future and i'm not an expert on cars; i'm not an expert on anything, i just hate capitalism

but like, i don't know.

things don't look great for buying used cars directly, let alone accounting for the overhead of 30+ giant coin-operated elevators which cars are put into, only to very quickly be taken out again

at least they don't have any competition... right?

An advertisement for a very similar business to Carvana, Vroom.

ah. well, still, hopefully these problems with sort themselves out. and now, a message from the CEO of Carvana:

Brennan Lee Mulligan in a CollegeHumor Sketch, the CEO of Skype. He is screaming, the subtitle reads: "What the fuck is Vroom?" The text "zoom" has been replaced from the original.


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