This. Service departments make way more profit than new car sales. Or used car sales. Or financing. The ideal SA, from management perspective, is one who can sell lots of unnecessary service. "Look at this! Your transmission fluid. Notice how it smells bad. You need to take care of it now!" (It always smells bad) Pushing out warranty service pumps the profit margin because warranty pays the least. Lying to delay warranty work makes the dealership more money sooner. If the customer gets frustrated and avoids bringing other warranty work in, even better. Most SAs are on commission. The honest ones get pushed out or make so little money they leave. It's one place where you want the FNG on your team. The greenest kid around.
I know this is sort of off topic and an older post, but I was just reading through this thread and had to chime in on this, almost every aspect of this post is false.
At some level, the service department does create more profit for the dealership, but from an owner/dealer principal perspective the revenue generated from the service department goes towards what they call "service absorption" which is in a nutshell, the profit generated by the service department goes towards overall dealership operating expenses. 100% service absorption means the service department's gross covered all of the operating expenses of the entire dealership, therefore whatever sales generates is operating profit.
But not to get too far off topic, the real reason I am responding to this post is the completely false narrative that many people push about the service department making less money on warranty repairs. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Ford dealers operate on a negotiated labor rate which is GENERALLY, though not ALWAYS a higher labor rate than customer pay door rate. What happens is as the market adjusts and dealers increase their customer pay door rate, they can do a labor study and Ford will increase their warranty labor rate ABOVE the average customer pay door rate. Most of the time the service department is operating at this higher warranty labor rate until the market adjusts again and the customer pay door rate increases at which time they can perform another labor rate study.
Once people understand that warranty actually pays the dealer MORE than customer pay door rate, the rest of the narrative (dealers don't want warranty work, dealers would rather deny warranty repairs, or simply not performing warranty repairs "pumps up the profit margin") completely falls apart.
I can also tell you that in the 23 years Ive been in dealerships professionally at several different positions, the way service departments and service advisors operate have changed dramatically in the last 5-10 years. Now the almighty survey is king at a dealership. I personally know that most Ford dealerships (not all) would rather lose a few dollars here or there than to get bad surveys. Too low a CSI score can actually cost the dealership tens of thousands of dollars PER MONTH. One way to **** off an owner/dealer principal? Hit their personal income for $50,000 one month because the service advisor tried to sell "unnecessary" services too many times.
Times have changed, opinions like this seem to stick around but dealerships that operate to "rip off customers" don't stick around long anymore. Everyone is learning how to change and adapt to the increase amount of information out there. Service personnel are either embracing it or moving on.
Sorry for the long winded post and Im not personally attacking you, but part of my job is dealing with misinformation like this in my community and I feel the need to correct it when I see it.
-Joe