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Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean has raised millions of dollars in campaign contributions through his web site. Dean has also used his web site as a tool to organize grass-roots monthly, face-toface meetings of backers nationwide.

And even though its only been around as a commercially viable medium for about ten years, the Internet is so much a part of our daily lives that its difficult to remember when it wasn’t around.

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We can personally attest to what the Internet has meant to businesses in the RV industry, especially RV dealers, since we host more than 200 RV industry web sites on our sister company’s web site RV America On Line™.

In case history after case history, the Internet is having a dramatic impact on growth, according to reports we get in feedback from our clients. In the Interview with Alan Libove, Hitcharama, an RV dealership in New Jersey (this month’s feature story (page 6), Libove says he can track nearly 20% of all sales to leads that started by people who visited Hitcharama’s web site.

While we take some pride in our role of helping to drive traffic to his site and developing tools to help him present his business on line, the credit for Hitcharama’s amazing results rests squarely with the dealership itself.

Libove recognized early on that the Internet had the potential of helping his team generate more sales and has experimented with different ways to promote Hitcharama on the web, and his efforts have paid large dividends.

The Internet can be a valuable asset to companies in the RV industry, but the downside is that there are, what we consider to be, parasites muddying up the waters in an otherwise clear stream.

The parasites are “virtual” businesses. There are two kinds as we see it - the broker and the so-called RV dealer who doesn’t really have a business, but a web site address. That’s the downside of the Internet.

We have a policy at RV America which states that we will not do business with any company that (a) doesn’t have a permanent physical location where the public can come in a see the products he or she offers for sale, and (b) we do not do business with RV brokers.

If you need to ask, let me explain. For nearly 30 years RV News’ driving principal has been “what’s good for the RV industry as a whole.” When we roll up issue, as we have been known to do, and write what others might consider a ‘controversial’ editorial, it is always weighed against that fundamental principal.

For example, when the Affinity Group, Inc., (AGI) bought Camping World, Inc., we did not think the move was in the best interest of the RV industry because it put AGI in direct competition with every RV dealer in the country that had a service department and/or an aftermarket store.

Likewise, we didn’t think it was in the best interest of the Industry when Camping World under AGI’s leadership, started selling rolling stock.

And to follow that thread a step or two forward, we do not think Steve Adams‚ (AGI’s owner) successful effort to take over Holiday RV Superstores, aka, Recreation USA, was good for the industry, nor do we think those principal executives within AGI who are buying up some of the best known RV dealerships in the country under their own names, which I suspect is a guise to take some of the heat off the company, is good for the industry.

Why? It’s because we believe that the success of the industry depends upon having a strong national network of privately owned dealerships. These are business owners that are an integral part of the communities they live in, and they not only sell and service RVs, they have a vested interest in their overall community and make a variety of contributions besides paying taxes.

Anything that tends to weaken the local dealer chips away at all of our livelihoods.

And it’s that precise reason why we believe that the parasites we mentioned earlier are not good for the industry either.

Brokers and ‘virtual’ dealers have not made the investment in land, employees and all the other facets of operating a small business. And without that overhead, they can take unfair advantage when it comes to the selling price of an RV. They are no better, in our opinion, than the so-called ‘gypsies’.

Since they don’t have to stock inventory and don’t incur the associated costs such as floorplanning, these parasites are often satisfied with a measly profit of $500 or $1,000. A real RV dealer cannot survive on that kind of markup while they are paying salaries, mortgage, training, equipment investments, social security taxes, workmen’s compensation, other types insurance and all sorts of other bills.

So these other so-called businesses literally take food out of the mouths of legitimate business owners and undermine the success of these RV dealerships.

As guilty as the parasites themselves are, the RV manufacturers that supply these renegades with product must accept some of the blame.

Granted, most RV manufacturers do a good job in this area and protect their dealers because they have written dealer agreements with stocking requirements. That tends to eliminate the ne’er-do-wells.

We noticed, however, a recent case where a manufacturer, namely R-Vision’s Trail- Lite division, got involved in a controversy because a few people selling the product were price cutting so badly that other dealers could not compete. RV dealers complained so Trail-Lite, in an effort of solve the problem, came out with a policy that more or less restricted any businesses’ ability to advertise their products outside their marketing area and the Internet was expressly prohibited -- talk about ‘throwing out the baby with the bath water’.

Trail-Lite quickly saw the error of its ways when a large number of RV dealers complained, and the policy was abandoned.

Trail-Lite’s heart was in the right spot, but their medicine to cure the ill was worse than the disease.

RV manufacturers certainly need to be careful to avoid the problems such decisions produce and the potential legal ramifications if they have to terminate a ‘virtual’ dealer in the future. But more importantly, they need to support the dealer network that made them successful in the first place.

We are certainly not against the free enterprise system, but we all must remember that without a strong network of RV dealers, our entire industry would suffer.