In August, Kathleen Calligan, the CEO of Middle Tennessee’s Better Business Bureau (BBB), felt that she’d exhausted her options. For years, the sales practices at Bill Heard Chevrolet had elicited a storm of customer complaints. She needed a full-time staffer just to keep track of them all.
According to the BBB, the Antioch car dealership intentionally targets consumers with bad credit. Sometimes Bill Heard allows people to take cars home before the deal is officially done. The customer goes away with the impression that only a few routine details are left to complete. A week or so later, though, and in some cases, months, the dealership calls to say that the loan hasn’t been approved. Then the sales staff tries to pressure the customer into buying the automobile anyway—even if it means agreeing to a much steeper interest rate. One former Bill Heard salesman says this is known as “roping them in.”
Calligan talked to the local managers of Bill Heard about this and other practices but says she got nowhere. Undeterred, she traveled to Columbus, Ga., the headquarters of the Bill Heard franchises, to meet with Bill Heard himself, the elderly founder of the nationwide car chain that claims to be the “world’s largest Chevy retailer.”
Calligan says that Bill Heard was “very concerned” about what he heard. He should have been. In the last three years, the Better Business Bureau has investigated 91 complaints alleging deceptive business practices at the dealership. During that same period, the bureau investigated a grand total of four complaints combined against three of Bill Heard’s top area Chevy competitors: Jim Reed, Tom Bannen and Team Chevrolet. The BBB has received only four complaints in the last 18 months about Capitol Chevrolet.
Now, adding to the company’s troubles with the city’s business watchdog, Bill Heard is the target of three separate lawsuits alleging identity theft. A fourth suit claiming “outrageous conduct” is expected to be filed this week. Naturally, Calligan is still concerned about how Bill Heard sells its Chevrolets.
“This is not something I want to do—to go over the head of the local dealership,” Calligan says. “But it’s something I’m willing to do when the problem is as deep and vast as this one.”
Last month, Bryan and Heather Riley, a young couple from Portland, Tenn., received a call from Bill Heard Chevrolet, 10 days after they bought—or thought they bought—a blue 2002 Chevrolet Impala. The dealership told them the loan for the Impala hadn’t been approved after all. But it wasn’t a big deal, a finance staffer told them, saying just to come back and “we’ll try to get you in a cheaper car.” Later, Bill Heard staffers called to say they could get the couple approved for the Impala after all.
Like many couples in their 20s, the Rileys have less than perfect credit. When they first visited the dealership, they asked the staff at Bill Heard whether that would be a problem. They say they were told not to worry about it. So when the couple heard that their loan wasn’t approved, they felt they’d been tricked. They believed that the dealership had them drive the car home knowing full well they wouldn’t be approved, only to pressure them later into putting more money down or agreeing to a higher-interest loan. So the couple decided to return the car, ignoring the dealership’s pleas to finalize a new loan or look into a buying another Chevy.
But their refusal to renegotiate didn’t end the ordeal. The Rileys say that when they returned to the dealership, the finance staff continued to hound them about buying the car and kept them waiting for hours before finally agreeing to return the couple’s $2,000 deposit.
Bill Heard’s most controversial scheme involves “on-the-spot finance and delivery,” which allegedly targets customers, like the Rileys, with bad credit. Nobody at Bill Heard—from general manager Bill Crick to its local attorney—would discuss this practice or any of the others that have caused its legal and business troubles. But the BBB has investigated the car dealership, uncovering what its claims is a pattern of “deceptive sales practices.” In part because of that pattern, the bureau slapped the dealership with an “unsatisfactory” record in its most recent report. Further, the dealership isn’t a BBB member, because, Calligan says, “it doesn’t meet membership standards.”
Attorney Barry Weathers, who currently has four lawsuits pending against the dealership, says that Bill Heard’s methods for coaxing customers into agreeing to less favorable terms is a blunt pressure tactic.
“The despicable part is that Bill Heard knows before their customers pull out of their lot that their credit is going to be rejected,” says Weathers, who’s spoken to nearly 50 customers and former employees of the dealership. “By letting them believe that they’ve been approved, they have control over them.”
But not everyone takes the bait, as the Rileys clearly illustrate. Some customers tell the dealership they’re not willing to agree to a new loan and simply plan to return the car. But even then, the pressure tactics continue. According to the BBB, sometimes the dealership claims to have already sold the car a customer traded in, putting additional pressure on the client to agree to a new loan.
“The choice you have is to take the deal or walk home,” says Calligan, who’s met with former Bill Heard employees.
Other Bill Heard dealerships also have found themselves in trouble for these kinds of tactics. Last year, a Bill Heard dealership in Florida agreed to pay $325,000 after a woman claimed that a salesman grabbed her keys and refused to give them back when she said she couldn’t afford the car. By midnight, the exhausted woman said that she relented and purchased the car, thinking that was the only way she could go home. Bill Heard didn’t admit to any wrongdoing, but it agreed to pay the settlement and cease all deceptive practices.
After meeting with Calligan in August, the dealership said it would make sure that its customers would know when they drove home with a car that was not yet theirs. In fact, the dealership gave the Rileys paperwork stating in bold letters that their “loan has not been approved.” The couple asked about that document. But the Rileys say they were told not to worry—that the caveat was a mere formality. The banks had closed, they were told, and it was too late to make the deal official.
“They congratulated us,” Bryan Riley says. “They gave us the keys and told us to enjoy the car.” Now the Rileys are suing the dealership for outrageous conduct. “We want something done,” Heather Riley says. “We don’t want anyone else falling for this.”
An exasperated Calligan isn’t pleased that, despite previous warnings, the dealership still may be allowing people to drive home with a car that they think they own. “What kind of dealership continues to do business like this?” she says. “Over and over again, we have said that we think this dealership knows when a customer isn’t going to get approved. Why not just say so instead of having them take the car and bring it back later?”
As if having an angry Better Business Bureau on their case wasn’t enough, Bill Heard Chevrolet must also contend with three other lawsuits—and counting—alleging identity theft. In the first such case filed against the dealership, an Antioch woman named Karen Jones claims that Bill Heard stole her Social Security number to process another woman’s credit application. Here’s what she says happened: Jones had completed a loan application but decided not to make a purchase. Shortly thereafter, a different woman with almost the same name—and bad credit—came in to buy a pickup truck. According to the lawsuit, Bill Heard processed this woman’s credit application and realized there was no way she’d qualify for a loan. So the dealership “knowingly and intentionally” printed Karen Lee Jones’ Social Security number on the customer statement for the other woman.
So the woman with poor credit took home a $30,000 pickup truck but couldn’t make the payments. The truck was eventually repossessed. Meanwhile, Karen Lee Jones, who had no idea that her Social Security number had been used to process someone else’s loan, applied for credit elsewhere, only to discover that she had defaulted on a mysterious loan.
“You talk about panic. It took me a while to calm down,” Jones tells the Scene. “This has been really stressful for me. I already have bills to pay.”
Jones has since straightened out the matter with the bank and is repairing her credit. But she says that when she went to the Bill Heard dealership to tell them what happened, “no one would come down and talk to me.” She’s suing the dealership for fraud, intentional misrepresentation and outrageous conduct. Jones is asking for a maximum $5 million judgment and maximum $10 million in punitive damages.
The dealership didn’t respond to other allegations, but it did choose to respond to the identity theft charges. In a statement to the Scene on company letterhead, the dealership blamed the mess on a mistaken credit report. “Bill Heard has apologized to Karen L. Jones and is working to resolve the matter,” the unsigned statement read.
Following her lawsuit, however, more people came forward to Jones’ attorney Barry Weathers, claiming that Bill Heard also used their credit information without their consent. Two of them filed lawsuits. In one case, John Michael Knight, of Greenbrier, claimed that the dealership lifted his Social Security number when processing a credit application for his father. Bill Heard claims that it was the father who used his son’s credit to secure a loan. The father has since died.
Knight’s complaint also sarcastically claims that the dealership’s attitude is reflected by the “compassionate words” of its general manager, Bill Crick, who allegedly told his staff: “Let me make something clear. There is no loyalty anymore. Most of these people will never be back. This means you got only this one chance to f___ them. Make it count.” A former Bill Heard employee recounted those comments to Knight’s lawyer.
Weathers, the plaintiffs’ attorney, says Bill Heard Chevrolet is “a cancer on this community.”
Meanwhile, Calligan says that while complaints against Bill Heard are now fewer in number, there are still farr too many and the dealership continues to stonewall. “We’ve done everything we can to help this dealership do business the right way. But there comes a point when you realize that doing things ethically is just not a part of their business plan.”
