After the ride this morning, I brought the difference between ‘dealership’ and ‘store’ up with a fellow rider who sells cars for a living. I asked him if he and his fellow car salesmen called the place at which they worked a ‘dealership’ or a ‘store’. Without putting too much thought into it, he offhandedly said, “a store”. (I really don’t think he had actually ever thought about it, and just threw out what to him was the most sensible word to him at the time.)
As we talked it over, we discussed the fact that a dealership represents a specific manufacturer of a product: Ford, Toyota, Chevrolet, etc., and is licensed by each respective manufacturer to sell new Fords, Toyotas, or Chevrolets, etc. One thinks of such places as Ford, Toyota, or Chevrolet dealerships – perhaps a car store too, but also a dealership. Furthermore, consider that a licensed dealership buys its products only from the manufacturer, not a wholesaler. True: some car dealerships sell more than one brand of new car, but they are, nevertheless, still licensed by the respective manufacturer to sell those automobiles, hence, they are dealers of those cars, thus, 'dealerships'.
As far as I know, a store does not need a license from the manufacturer to sell the manufacturer’s products. The store only needs to purchase the products from either the manufacturer or a wholesaler, and have a place to sell them and customers to buy them. I’m sure one could find a store that is also a licensed ‘dealer’ of a particular product, but in my mind, that makes it both a store and a dealership.
In the end, he changed his mind and said that he worked at a ‘dealership’. Personally, I think there are valid arguments on both sides, but only as long as one recognizes that the two can and do exist simultaneously, in one entity, and that a ‘dealership’ is not just a hoity-toity word, but a word that describes a specific situation, or agreement between the manufacturer and the seller.
It’s not an accident that different words have different meanings, and are exclusively used in different places to describe different things. Neither is it a prescriptivist plot [written in jest] designed to limit anyone’s inalienable right to experiment with, play with, mangle, or abuse the language in any way he or she damn well pleases.
