Tired of clearing snow off your car? Try working for a car dealership (2024)

A few years back, during a last-minute Christmas shopping run to the Lehigh Valley Mall, some jerk keyed my car while I was in Macy's trying to remember my wife's shoe size.

And he didn’t just carve a small line into the side panel. He was an artist who decided to make the entire body of my 2008 Hyundai Elantra his canvas.

I want to thank him.

On Friday morning, in a routine that’s seemingly happened at least twice a week every week since the first week of January, I went outside to clear the snow off my car.

For many, particularly after this latest storm that left 19 inches of snow in parts of the Lehigh Valley, this is an exercise in patience. The goal of cleaning the car needs to be balanced with the concern that being too aggressive could damage the body.

I don’t really have that concern these days because I never got my car refinished after the incident at the mall.

So while my neighbor’s taking a feather duster to his beamer, I’ve got a snow shovel hacking away at the roof of the Hyundai. Within minutes, my car, with all its deformities glistening under the winter sun, is ready for the road.

The neighbor with the beamer’s probably there for another hour, but even he’s got nothing to complain about.

Did you ever wonder who clears snow from all the cars in a dealership lot and how they do it?

Eric Watson, general sales manager at Phillipsburg Easton Hyundai, knows the answers all too well. He tells me the salespeople are responsible and there's no real trick to it. They report to the lot off Route 173 in Greenwich Township when the roads are safe enough for driving and they clear off each car individually in a task that involves some strategic planning in advance, multiple shifts, a tool called a snow broom and a lot of elbow grease, Watson says.

“It’s funny because I was at a grocery store (Friday morning) and heard a lady complaining about cleaning off her car,” he says. “I told her at least you don’t have to clean off more than 300 cars. I thought I’d put it out there. I know a lot of other car dealers are feeling the same way.”

The dealership will close if the roads are too hazardous. That happened on Thursday, but it reopened on Friday morning, meaning the cars needed to look their best as soon as possible. Watson says you never know when the next buyer will walk through the door.

A few customers stopped in on Friday morning, he reports, despite roads still being coated with snow and ice. “Not many, but more than I thought,” he says, referring to the number of customers. “I think a lot of people have cabin fever.”

Watson admits not all the cars were in pristine shape. Given the amount of snowfall, Friday’s work on getting each one cleared off was going to be a daylong affair. The dealership did what it could to prepare for the storm. It moved as many cars as possible off the lot and into the shop and showroom floor on Wednesday. It had a plan in place to plow the lot by section. There were plenty of snow brooms on hand.

The snow broom is the preferred snow-clearing tool for the dealership. It’s a foam contraption that can be dragged across the body of a car without causing damage to the finish. Watson says Phillipsburg Easton Hyundai gets its snow brooms through a special supplies dealer; he hasn’t seen them marketed in retail stores.

But as miraculous as the snow broom may be, it doesn’t necessarily speed up the process of getting more than 300 cars ready for show after a snowstorm. And although the salespeople have picked up a few tricks over the years -- for example, starting each car and letting it warm up for five to 10 minutes so the bottom layer of snow melts -- it’s always a labor-intensive, time-consuming process, Watson says.

“We don’t like to push the guys,” he says, adding the dealership usually provides the salespeople with lunch on days after snowstorms and makes sure no one overexerts themselves. “It’s going to get done. We just don’t like to force it. … It takes a lot of dedication. This has been a very tough winter.”

Oh yeah, and I’d be remiss to not mention that the salespeople aren’t raking it in for the extra work.

“Salespeople don’t really get paid to do all this,” Watson says. “If we’re not selling cars, we’re not making money.”

I can sympathize with this. It almost makes me want to buy a new car. I wonder what the trade-in value would be for a 2008 Hyundai Elantra that’s keyed from bumper to bumper.