Most TV commercials suck, really. But you got to admit that the latest rounds of Allstate Insurance commercials are incredibly funny. Click on this one to see if you agree:
They make a great point….”mayhem is everywhere!” Mr Mayhem proclaims in one commercial. And in this clip he snarls: “If you named your own price for auto insurance, you could be paying for this yourself!” You gotta laugh at how smug and irritating this guy is.
But its a perfect case in point for the repossession business. Can you think of any line of work that has such a potential for mayhem? I can’t.
Mix big heavy cars with bigger and heavier tow trucks. Toss in a few angry customers and financially-desperate repossessors. Throw in some alcohol and a few handguns (somethings with the customer or, worse yet, with the repo agent!) Stir together under a lot of pressure, generally in the middle of the night. That’s a recipe for mayhem.
When price becomes the sole criteria (or even the MAIN criteria) for a service like ours, and you ignore every other factor, you do encourage mayhem.
This could simply sound like a plea for higher repo fees. It’s not.
We all nod in agreement when someone says “you get what you pay for!” So its true in the repo business, too: to get good, intelligent people to do this job using good equipment, with lots of training and lots of insurance, it takes more money than what some of the too-big-to-fail banks want to pay. And the result has been “accidents” like this in which consumers or repossessors have shot each other, run over each other, rammed each other, or committed various other acts of “mayhem”. Several lawsuits from all of this are winding their way through the court systems right now. In 2011, lenders will pay out tens of millions of dollars for death or injury claims over repossessions, the majority of which involved repossessions handled on a no-recovery-no-fee basis. The two go hand in hand, and its getting scary.
And in most cases, unnecessary.