Dataset of the Day: Chrysler Dealer Closings

Chrysler has recently announced that by June 9th, 2009 they will be closing 789 of their 3200 dealerships across the USA. Sales for many dealers have been very low and a little over 50 percent of all the dealers account for close to 90 percent of all the company’s U.S. sales. This shows a definite need to eliminate dealers that are not performing at high enough levels. Below is a map of all the dealer closings across the country. (click on the map and all images, including the charts, below for a larger, clearer view)

Finder! link to Chrysler Dealer Closing List, USA, 6.9.2009
Maker! link to Chrysler Dealership Closings, USA, 6.9.2009

From the news it is certain that most of these closing have been based exclusively on sales performance of the dealership. But could there have been other factors that lead to poor performance in the area? I decided to use Finder! and Maker! to look into finding an answer to this question.

I started at the state level and made a map of number of dealerships closed by state. (see below)

Also in this dataset I added many different economic and non-economic factors that I thought might correlate with the number of dealerships that were closed by state. These factors included: Unemployment Rate by State, State Population, Number of Foreclosures in the State, Foreclosure Rate in the State, Number of Registered Automobiles in the State, Registered Automobiles per Person in the State, and Population Density. The correlation results are below:

I also ran correlations with the number of dealerships closed per state normalized with the state population. The correlation results are below:

From all these correlations I realized that nothing really correlated. The highest was the correlation between Number of Dealerships Closed by State with Total Number of Registered Automobiles in the State at .69. This shows that states with large amounts of registered vehicles tended to lose more dealers than states with less registered vehicles. These states with high amounts of registered vehicles also tended to have large populations where the demand for vehicles was greater. This data is not too remarkable and still tells us very little.

I then tried to focus my geography down a little bit more to see if I could find any different results. I looked for counties in the country that had three or more dealers closed and looked at Unemployment Levels in those Counties for the month of April 2009. Below are my findings:

With the national unemployment rate being about 6.5% across the nation we see that unemployment at the local level did not have that high of an effect. Two of the five counties are below the national unemployment level, two are above the level, and one is right around the level.

To get a better understanding of these closings I have concluded that I need more data. The two types of data that I would love to collect are: Percentage of dealerships in a state that are being closed and Sales Figures for all Chrysler dealerships across the country. With percentage of dealerships in the state closed I could see what states lost the majority of their dealerships and correlations could have been more telling. With the sales data I would have been able to see if the closures were solely based on sales and have a better picture of where sales were doing well and where they were doing poorly. If anyone out there has such data or has other ideas about data to try and correlate please respond. With these new ideas, I will then reexamine this topic and see if I can find any interesting trends.