Business: General Motors Staggered

Last spring Madam Secretary of Labor Perkins suggested that the automobile industry (which now runs frantically night & day for a few months and then coasts through the rest of the year), might well spread production more evenly throughout the twelvemonth. One good way to accomplish that, said she, was to turn the big national automobile shows over to dealers. Then the motormakers would not be so anxious to introduce almost all their models at the same time.

The big Manhattan automobile show will be run by dealers next January but it looks as if the industry would concentrate more model announcements around the year-end than ever before. Madam Perkins’ idea however was not wholly lost on the industry.

Last fortnight in extending the automobile code President Roosevelt revealed that the motormakers were seeking ways & means of smoothing out the seasonal sales curve and declared that he, too, had ordered a study made. And last week General Motors became the first member of the industry to appropriate the Perkins plan.

“Certain new models will be introduced in the late summer or early fall,” President Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr. wrote his stockholders. “Normally approximately 60% of the industry’s yearly output is sold to consumers in the first six months. Consumer sales in November and December are approximately 7½% of the total for the year, against 24% for April and May. . . .

“Additional workers are required for the peak season, with but limited opportunity for employment in the balance of the year. Longer hours are essential for the whole working force in the peak season to offset the short hours when merchandise cannot be sold except in greatly reduced quantity.”

Consensus in the trade was that GM would offer its fast-selling, lower-priced Pontiacs, Chevrolets and Oldsmobiles around the year-end, save its Buicks, La Salles and Cadillacs for midseason. Since most of GM’s sales are in the lower-priced models, the stagger plan will still leave some pretty jagged jiggles in the GM production curve.