No news was good news on Friday for the owners of Vicksburg’s two General Motors dealerships, as it appears neither will be included in the approximately 1,100 dealerships nationwide being told by the struggling auto giant they will have to shut their doors by the end of 2010.

“They said we’d get notice by FedEx by yesterday afternoon or this morning, and we haven’t gotten one, so I feel pretty confident we’re in the clear,” George Carr, owner of Geroge Carr Buick Cadillac Pontiac GMC on South Frontage Road, said Friday afternoon. “I really didn’t feel like either of us in Vicksburg would be in jeopardy…I’m sure (Atwood Chevrolet) has been as profitable as we have.”

FedEx letters bearing the bad news were to arrive to dealers by Friday morning at GM franchises around the country. The dealers were judged on sales, customer service scores, location, condition of facilities and other criteria. It’s unclear how many of Mississippi’s 74 GM dealers will be affected because the manufacturer is not releasing a list of the dealers receiving closure notices.

Alan Atwood, owner of Atwood Chevrolet on North Frontage Road, also said he was confident the 51-year-old dealership would be spared closure — but admitted he was nonetheless relieved to not see a FedEx truck pull into the lot on Friday morning.

“Absolutely, we felt like we’d be OK — but you never know,” Atwood said.

At least one dealership owner in Mississippi confirmed receiving a closure notice on Friday. Courtesy Chevy co-owner Sammy Green — who has been with GM for 16 years — said he wasn’t too surprised to learn his Booneville dealership is getting the hook, citing the town’s relatively low population of approximately 8,600 people.

The roughly 1,100 closure notices delivered Friday are part of a larger GM plan to close 2,600 dealerships — nearly 42 percent of its 6,200 lots nationwide — as the automaker tries to restructure outside of bankruptcy court and become profitable again. Thousands of jobs will likely be lost, and governments will lose untold dollars in tax revenue as dealerships are forced to close.

GM’s announcement is more bad economic news for dealers, communities and businesses still reeling from Chrysler’s similar nationwide dealer cuts a day earlier, which did not include Vicksburg’s lone Chrysler dealership, Blackburn Motor Co. And more bad news could be on the way — GM is still to provide an update to approximately 470 dealers of Saturn, Hummer and Saab on the status of those brands, which it plans to sell. Both automakers are scrambling to reorganize and stay alive in a severe recession that has cut sales of cars and trucks.

While GM doesn’t own the dealers, its network is too big, causing dealers to compete with each other and giving shoppers too much leverage to talk down prices and hurt the company’s future sales.

“Too many dealers, in actuality, are a problem,” Mark LaNeve, GM’s vice president of North American sales and marketing, said in a conference call with reporters.

Both Chrysler and GM say they are cutting the number of dealers because they have too many outlets that are too close to each other, and the competition drives down prices. But as the ranks of dealers thin and competition decreases, that likely will mean higher prices for car and truck buyers. Vicksburg, however, has proven itself large enough for two GM dealerships, said Atwood.

“There’s honestly very few times when Geroge and I go head to head on a deal. They have their clientele that they regularly sell to, and we have ours,” said Atwood. “The last time we had a big downturn in the market was in the ’80s, and we survived that and came out of it even stronger — and I expect us to do the same in this downturn.”

Both Atwood and Carr said auto sales in Vicksburg have not taken the same nosedives reported by the hardest hit dealers across the county.

“We don’t ever see the big boom times, but we don’t see the big busts, either,” said Carr, who estimated overall new and used car sales were off 10 to 15 percent at the most. “Who knows what this economy is going to do, but I think the diversified economy in Vicksburg — with the farm industry, government workers, casino workers and tourism industry — I think it does help keep our sales a little more stable.” 

In the 1980s, GM, Chrysler and Ford controlled more than 75 percent of U.S. sales, but that dropped to 48 percent last year. GM alone held nearly 51 percent of the market in 1962, and 22 percent last year.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Contact Steve Sanoski at ssanoski@vicksburgpost.com