There are lots of countries run worse than the US, and quite a few run better.
There s nothing wrong about them, they work hard and are not rent seekers (a commission on successful deal is the exact opposite of a rent).
Every countries has them (Im French, live in Hong Kong) and what you bemoaned is mundane in my experience.
When the real estate lobby makes the whole industry a de facto closed shop, the real estate agencies themselves are full of middlemen picking each other's pockets, and the commission rate and total amount are far in excess of what you'd expect in a free market, and completely unrelated to any effort or expense on behalf of the agent? Sure, it's the exact opposite of rent seeking /sarc
You personally may prefer to handle each of the above on your own, but millions of people prefer one-stop shopping where everything is taken care of, along with services like title registration, having a person show you how to use the electronics, offering coverage for regular maintenance, etc.
Why would direct delivery take 3-6 months? Also, most dealerships wont give you your car the day you buy it anyway.
As far as financing goes, thats totally orthogonal to the process of buying the car. As it stands now, car dealers get kick back from financers and try to steer customers into the highest interest loans they can, so decoupling the two processes would probably benefit customers.
Recalls aren't handled by salesmen.
Used care sure. Dealers make sense. Secondhand markets need price discovery too afterall.
Every consumer bank offers auto loan financing and yet somehow, tons of people prefer to go with the dealer.
You still didn't state how the car would get from the factory to your house - would you have to hire a delivery company? Or you think GM is going to put up with "your car delivery is approaching your house" and you reply with "I'm at work can you come back at 6?"
Recalls are handled by dealerships, which is where salesman work.
Like most of HN, you are choosing to ignore the real-world reasons these companies exist and assume some techno-utopia would solve all problems. Indeed, a small percentage of car buyers would benefit from a pure direct-from-factory purchase option, but the vast majority of car buyers want or need one or more of the services that car dealerships provide.
That's how long it takes now. Relying on dealerships is part of the reason for that. If manufacturers were allowed to direct deliver, they could do away with dealerships as the only warehousing mechanism, and do their own warehousing to cut down that time. I was trying to point out that the constraints of the current system would not apply to a different system, but you missed that. No biggie.
> Every consumer bank offers auto loan financing and yet somehow, tons of people prefer to go with the dealer.
Again, why is that? Go to a dealership and see what price you can talk them down to with financing, and what price you can talk them down to paying cash. You'll be surprised at the results.
> You still didn't state how the car would get from the factory to your house - would you have to hire a delivery company?
You could pick it up from the warehouse, or have it delivered. Both of those technologies have existed for a long time :)
> Like most of HN, you are choosing to ignore the real-world reasons these companies exist and assume some techno-utopia would solve all problems
What does doing away with dealerships have to do with technology? Im confused by that statement.
I think it's always been this way. It takes a lot of work and resources to deal with individual customers at scale.
>Staffing firms, real estate agents, car dealerships, attorneys, healthcare, etc.
Staffing firms, real estate agents, and attorneys are not unique to the US at all. Staffing firms are used by many companies because they don't want to hire full-time HR people to do "talent acquisition". (Personally, I haven't had good experiences when I've tried interviewing at these companies, and have always done better by going with companies that do their own recruiting and hiring.) People selling their house don't have the time or resources to sell it themselves usually, dealing with all the prospective buyers. And attorneys are pretty necessary if you have non-trivial legal issues anywhere.
Health insurance isn't even unique to the US; lots of developed nations have systems that look sorta like ObamaCare. But they all do it MUCH better, with FAR lower costs. Someone's probably written a long book somewhere explaining why the US is so uniquely bad here.
Car dealerships aren't unique to the US (how else are you going to buy a car?), but the requirement that they be independently owned is, and adds to the cost of cars in the US, and I think especially results in a lot of (less-than-savvy) customers being ripped off with unnecessary charges.
The thing I see about the US is that it seems to be uniquely bad at actually fixing problems. Most of these middlemen services you list are natural outcomes of real-world constraints. A company that makes milk, for instance, can't realistically sell it individually to customers all over your city or state, so they sell it to distributors, who distribute it to their retail stores, where customers buy it to take home. Similarly, a small car manufacturer, like Studebaker, can't set up dealerships all across the US, so they partner with local dealerships that are probably selling other mfgrs' cars too. Back in the early days of cars, all the carmakers were small, remember. A century later, they're mostly big, but the US made laws long ago requiring independent dealers, and now they can't change.
For whatever reason, as time goes on and things change, the US is uniquely bad it seems at adapting and fixing the problem. In better-run countries, they'd see this independent-dealership law is no longer necessary, and change it. In the US, it stays, because car dealers are politically connected to local politicians.
Yeah, this is the part I'm trying to understand. There is lobbying/corruption, but that can't be the whole story. Perhaps culturally and historically, the US has been a prosperous high-trust society that did not have to worry too much about people skimming a percentage off the top for providing a service. And over time, that has ballooned into the state we are in now.
The other thing I see is that the executive branch of the government is egregiously bad at implementing any sane designs. There is soviet era levels of dysfunction in the federal government when it comes to employment based immigration.
When was the US ever a high-trust society? I don't think it ever was in my lifetime (and I'm not young). I feel like the US sees itself as a high-trust society (or a former one, not so long ago), but the reality is quite different. I'd say, at best, the US was a medium-trust society, with highly variable levels of corruption by locality, and is getting steadily worse.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-07/idp-education-ceo-and...
The interesting part is how power tends to centralize into the hands of an elite few (ie oligarchies), rather than equalize or concentrate completely into the hands of one. And I think this tends to happen as to reflect the collective wills of society's members.