Flexible 12-Volt Dealers See Sales Increase

Here’s the first installment of our annual mobile electronics dealer roundtable, which will appear in full in the May issue of Dealerscope. Stay tuned to Dealerscope.com this week for more outtakes.

In this portion, we ask dealers how business is today compared with this time last year. Here’s what they said:

Jeffery Fay, Crutchfield: We're about even going into Q2 with 2008, with some categories up and some down. We attribute most of that to product unavailability. With some of the key manufacturers, where we had some new product launches this time last year, we're actually in a void with product this year, such as in-dash navigation. Last year we launched new SKUs and this year we're running out of the old ones.

Vicky Scrivner, Santa Fe Autosound: We were up through the end of February, and we still don't know what will happen with March. We had much nicer weather in February, and people like to work on their cars when that's the case.