HARMAN, W.Va. (AP) — When times were good, Linda Teter kept 30 Chevrolet trucks on the narrow roadside show lots at Midway Motor Co. Today, fewer than 10 gleam under the autumn sun.
Next month, when snow comes to the Allegheny Mountains, there will be even fewer.
"You're lucky to sell maybe five a month now," she says, waiting at her desk for the phone to ring, the door to open. "The economy's so upside-down, people have no money. They're scared to buy."
For 32 years, like her father and grandfather before her, Teter has managed the car and truck dealership the family started in 1929. Each year, she rode out the seasonally slow first quarter until the uptick that always came in March or April.
"Then in the last few years, it got up to May, and then June. It's clean into the summer now," she says. "And this year, it's been the whole year."
With an unrelenting credit crisis, breathtaking swings in the stock market and mounting consumer anxiety, Teter now wonders if winter will ever end; she trusts that her conservative instincts will keep her in business, but there's no guarantee.
Last month, the biggest Chevy chain in the country — Georgia-based Bill Heard Enterprises Inc. — went bust and closed 13 dealerships in six states. High gas prices and the other problems that thousands of small dealers face every day were magnified by its size — too much inventory and overhead, too few people qualifying for loans or even trying.
"It's the big ones, the small ones. We're all in the same boat afloating," Teter says.
"Even your retired people that have saved their money, they're not buying new vehicles," she says. "At one time, they used to come in every three years like clockwork and buy a new vehicle. But they're getting the attitude now, 'I'm scared to death. I'm not gonna buy. I'll just keep my old one.'"
For Midway, that means fewer sales and more service.
"Last month," Teter says, "we fixed things that wasn't worth fixing."
In Harman, customers are harder to come by even when times are good. The town of 200 is nestled in a valley in the Monongahela National Forest, near tourist attractions like the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area and the scenic climbing cliffs of Seneca Rocks. The nearest city is 23 miles away (Elkins, population 7,000), but it has the kind of expansive, option-filled car lots that buyers have come to expect.
Many of the local mining jobs have vanished, and even timber-driven industries like Bruce Hardwoods are cutting back.
GM's rising prices only make Teter's task harder. She struggled to sell expensive 2008 models, but the 2009 vehicles are even pricier. Then GM announced it would stop producing the Trailblazer, a smaller four-wheel drive SUV popular with Teter's female customers.
"They can't buy a Tahoe," she says, citing the more than $40,000 price tag. "So what are we going to sell them?"
Every week, it seems, Teter finds herself further at odds with GM.
"They called me yesterday and wanted me to take nine Impalas. I'm not gonna take nine Impalas going into winter," she complains. "They called me the week before and demanded (that she take) a $50,000 Suburban."
She sold two of those last year, both to a funeral home that won't be coming back for a third.
"Your normal-class people cannot buy them," she says. "They're too high."
Teter is 50, single, lean and tanned. She rises seven days a week at 5 a.m. to work her 500-acre sheep and cattle farm. After checking in with the two employees who run her struggling gas station and convenience store, she clocks in at Midway with three service technicians, including brother Jerry. At the end of each day, she heads home to care for a 78-year-old mother ailing from congestive heart failure.
Teter's office is a second home: The walls are heavy with family photos. Silk flowers and leaves surround auto-themed knickknacks. A stuffed coyote that in life killed 40 lambs in a week stands next to a computer desk where the technicians get online training.
The business was born the year of the great stock market crash, and Teter still runs it the old-fashioned way, the way her family taught her.
For years, she has sold tires and parts on credit, allowing customers to pay months later. Now, she's reconsidering.
"It's just a matter of looking up to what the future's holding," she says. "What if they lose their job come January?"
And as much as she wants to sell a car or truck, Teter now often finds herself counseling buyers against a big purchase. She tells them what they need to hear, whether they want it or not.
Over the summer, with gas running $4 a gallon, many people wanted to swap trucks and SUVs for fuel-efficient new cars. You'll lose your equity, she warned them. And when the snow is 2 feet deep, how will you get home?
Some customers thanked her for her honesty. Some traded anyway.
"And I know come January or February, these people are gonna be back in here."
In the '80s, Teter says, car dealers required 20 percent down before agreeing to finance a purchase. Today, too many people overextend, financing 100 percent of a vehicle they can't really afford.
"I have lost car deals to people, and probably if I had a boss, he'd have fired me," she says. "But I'll look at them and say, 'You can't afford this vehicle,' and didn't sell it to them for that reason."
Teter's father made her buy her first car, even though he could have afforded to give her one. She still has that $5,000 '79 Camaro.
"Young kids will come in here to buy a vehicle. It's great. Their first vehicle," she says. "But when he's financing that whole amount, and nine times out of 10 he wrecks it and totals it in six months, he's upside-down because he didn't have a down payment."
If banks had only taken her approach to credit, she thinks, the nation wouldn't be in this mess. "They knew that those people couldn't pay for $300,000 and $400,000 homes. They knew it, so why did they loan it?"
She knows why: "They didn't care about the consumer."
She'll have no part of that, she says. No matter how tough things get.
