Cox Auto Trader Makes Strategic Moves to Improve Online Automotive Advertising Business

[don carlson]

I found out that we are not getting any severance pay what can be done about this and they are also shorting us one week of pay.

 

[legally weasely]

Don, you are most likely out of luck here. As an I/C you are not entitled to much because you are not an employee. As an I/C you are in business for yourself, and (were) providing services to a comnpany that essentially just went out of business. there is no recourse there and even though you are supposed to get a thirty day notice for any change made to the contract, I will bet that going out of business is a mitigating circumstance that does not apply in your case either.
As an I/C, you cannot even claim unemployment, here again, because you are not an employee.
It's unfortunate, but it is what it is. If you review your signed contract very carefully, you will see that the company has protected itself very well. It's like teflon, nothing will stick.
As far as pay being witheld, it does not make sense. Check your pay schedule; some cities were paying the same week as a delivery, some were paying a week behind, and some even paid 2 weeks behind. Sorry for the bad news, and good luck to you as you are now in the same situation as everyone else that provided service to this company.

 

[Former Automart Employee]

I worked for Automart for 2 years and got out by the skin of my teeth in July thank God. I started to see the writing on the wall when they mergerd the Automart and Autotrader sales forces in my city with no clear cut plan for how the merger was actually going to work. Unfortunately Automart magazine was a great publication that that was bought out and then shut down due to greed. And they kept the .coms which sucked

 

[DENNIS]

our small independent dealership started day 1 with auto mart,very affordable at the time and good results,1 year later the small dealers were squeezed out and all the big boys started to use the magizine,and the price for a full page over night went from 200 to 425 a week we could no longer afford this,so we stopped using it,we and several dozen independents/up comes auto deals (same office) lower quality of ink/paper cheap knock off not even in a magizine form some weeks you were blurry some you were okay,but a lot more affordable, they never pused much for there step child paper even if it had a good following they would shoot pic,10 day before the mag. would come out ,we would have 30 to 40 % of our cars sold before the ad finally caught up to the day it came out on the stands,here is the thing,you stopped caring about your customers (the dealer) I WAS tired of hearing how comming out on a tues.or wed. didnt work for you,well that was when most dealers in our area would pick up new inventory! so we could put fresh (10 day old) inventory into your magizine and look like we were turning product.YES we did get calls from your auto deals,we are a small mom and pop and we have spent consistantly 2800.00 a month for 8 year solid/on 4 of their magazines,and their web site,each year prices go up and quality/service/and what you pay for went down,but the calls that were generated were great,even if they sold out the dealers,and the customers,NOTE THIS THEY HAD A MONOPOLY ON THE AUTO MAG.FORE EVER,COX OWNS THEM ALL! ANY ONE OUT THERE BESIDES COX STARTING UP A NEW DEALER PUBLICATION I HAVE 2800 A MONTH IN MY BUDGET AND AT LEAST 2 DOZEN DEALER FRIENDS WE ARE WILLING TO GIVE YOU A GO!!

 

[Seriously Though!!!!]

Will there be value in the autotrader/automart.com web sites? How can there be when all of these print customers are being pushed into them. It seems to me that the web packages are going to get awful expensive, the sites are going to be overloaded and you will have to have the lowest price inventory to win. I just don't see this as a sustainable business model without print support. COMMENTS????

 

[don carlson]

Look at your contracts. They are to give us 30 days written notice. They gave me notice over the phone and also told us they needed to keep us working for the 4 weeks but they are only giving us 3 weeks. They had a transition period where we did not get paid for 1 week so they say we are getting a 2 week check 1 week for the transition period we did not get plus the week they held back when you started and then the final week we delivered for a total of 3 weeks. Please go over your contract and then reply I did calll a Attorney on this.

 

[Past Trader GM, Now Printing in Texas]

Dennis, what city are you in? Is their not a print option for Autos?

 

[don carlson]

If auto trader, truck trader and other trader publications are still being printed and put on racks how are they going to accomplish this with getting rid of all of us I C's

 

[Longtime Cox/Traderpub employee]

Was at the store yesterday and saw the first books out without the dealer ads. WOW, what a joke. Ours were were probably 25% the size they used to be. Bet they only needed 1 pallet for those on the truck.

 

[Circulation/Independant Contractor in Motown]

Here in Motown I havent heard any word about them getting rid of us. This week came the news that Tradin Times has been cancelled-not even printed this past week and that the Muscle Car trader will be cancelled as of this coming week (first week in feb) Other then that though, they gave us new contracts, so I'm guessing they intend to keep us around for at least a short (maybe a month or two?) while longer-interesting to note is that on the contracts it states that a new one is to be issued every April 1st, so maybe they are just waiting till then..although again, like was mentioned, without even reading it fully I'm SURE the contract is teflon, one can only hope that they skimped a little on costs there though too and missed something..but I kinda doubt it. As for killing off the ic's completely, here in motown it could be done if they got a contract with a company called suburban magazine delivery-but I would think that would be more expensive (much more) then having it done by us IC's. An interesting thing that i noticed as well was that this week the auto trader was published without a glossy cover as the previous weeks had been. Also our circulation center hours were cut a bit as well, and judging by the mood of the one person running it in the afternoon and from reading on here I wouldnt be surprised if more cuts are on the horizon. Also, again to confirm what was said on here-Auto trader is now private seller only, though with the customer service issues reported on here I doubt that will last long as well. Hope this helps.... Thanks for all the info