The service department at Olathe Toyota in Olathe, Kan., is open on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. It's among only 7 percent of U.S. dealerships that provide full Sunday service, the National Automobile Dealers Association reports.
It hasn't always been easy to assign 13 shop employees to work on Sunday, concedes Tom Blackman, Olathe Toyota's fixed operations director. Most applicants for jobs in his service department don't want schedules that include Sunday hours, he says.
But other workers prefer the predictability of Sunday shifts, Blackman says. And in any event, he told Fixed Ops Journal, the dealership continues to buck the closed-Sunday trend for "one reason: customer convenience."
About 80 percent of Olathe Toyota's Sunday work consists of maintenance jobs, including quick service, Blackman says. The dealership averages 55 repair orders each Sunday.
Efficient dispatchers and a system of green, yellow and red lights that lets service customers know how much of a wait they face help the department manage its workload, Blackman says.