By now, you’ve heard of the remarkable GPS-related story from earlier this month in Philadelphia.
A 22-year-old woman, Carlesha Freeland-Gaither, was snatched off a Philadelphia street by a man who forced her into a car. The chilling scene was captured on surveillance video, and the suspected kidnapper was later shown using Freeland-Gaither’s credit card at an ATM.
These stories seldom turn out well. Thanks in part to GPS, this one did.
(It should be noted that it also turned out well because of Freeland-Gaither, who kicked out a window of the car, left her cellphone at the scene and survived. The suspected kidnapper is a convicted felon who is also suspected of hitting a 16-year-old girl on the head with a shovel and dousing her with bleach.)
Depending on which version you read, police either saw the license plate or a dealership sticker on the kidnapper’s getaway car or a car salesman contacted authorities after he saw ATM video of the suspect, whom he recognized as someone who bought a car from his dealership. Either way, it was determined that the kidnapper’s car had been bought from a Buy Here, Pay Here dealership in Virginia and was equipped with a GPS device.
Authorities contacted the dealership and asked it to turn on the car’s location tracker. Three days after the kidnapping, police officers located the car in a Maryland shopping center, arrested the suspect and freed Freeland-Gaither.
Jeff Williams was an interested follower of the story. Williams is the CFO of America’s Car-Mart in Bentonville, a Buy Here, Pay Here company that recently began installing GPS devices in the used cars it sells.
The car dealership involved in the Philadelphia kidnapping story was not a Car-Mart, Williams said. A semi-thorough perusal of all the generated kidnapping stories failed to mention the specific dealership involved.
The devices have caused controversy in the past because a couple of newspapers reported that some dealerships didn’t disclose their existence and also some allowed the dealership to kill the car’s ignition. Williams said Car-Mart’s GPS devices are simple locators that are fully disclosed to customers.
Williams said Car-Mart doesn’t actively track the sold car and only turns the device on to find it if payments become past due. Car-Mart cannot monitor the car’s operations or kill the ignition, Williams said.
“We’re not fully rolled out yet,” Williams said. “It’s really basic. It’s just to locate an asset if we need to.”
Car-Mart announced in its quarterly earnings report in August that it had invested in the GPS technology and the devices were now in about 67 percent of the cars it had sold. It should be no shocking news flash that many car buyers at dealerships such as Car-Mart have little credit or not the best of credit and thus are considered high risk.
GPS is disclosed to the buyer, Williams said. Car-Mart makes it mandatory with any new sale.
“All of the customers understand,” Williams said. “We’ve made it part of our transaction to provide what we do. We don’t like to use it. We don’t use it more than we have to. It’s just part of the business.”
Williams insists that GPS isn’t used just to track down cars for repossession when the buyer has failed to keep up with payments. He said it also helps Car-Mart contact the buyer if he or she falls behind in payments so that the problem can be managed before repossession.
“It helps us be more efficient,” Williams said. “It’s a big investment for us. It also helps the customers if the car is stolen or lost.”
At the release of earnings for the first quarter of 2015, Car-Mart CEO Hank Henderson said the investment had cost the company about $400,000 that quarter. It was too soon to tell how much in savings the technology had generated, either by making it easier to repossess the car or helping the company work out adjusted payments with the buyer.
“It’s about $3.50 per month per customer,” Williams said of the cost. “It’s a large amount. We’re trying to keep our operations efficient. It’s about keeping the cost of business down so prices are affordable.
“It’s still a little early. We’re not enough into the process to quantify it. We do expect savings down the road.”
It has already helped with one big save.