Dale Pollak’s version, and he has been right about most of this longer than anybody: home-run grosses of $2,000 to $4,000 a unit are increasingly rare in a price-transparent retail market.
What price transparency actually did
It did not lower prices. It compressed the spread between the best and the worst outcome on any given car. The customer walks in holding the same comparison you would run, so the ceiling on any single deal came down hard.
The floor did not come up to meet it. You can still buy a car wrong and lose real money. The distribution got worse on one end and stayed the same on the other.
The upside got capped. The downside did not.
How that changes the math on a used operation
When the home run existed, a store could carry a few bad buys on the back of one or two great deals a month. Take the home run away and the average becomes the whole business. Every unit has to be right, because no unit is going to be spectacular.
Which means volume of good buys beats brilliance on a few. That is a coverage problem, not a talent problem, and it is a different thing to solve.