Our story
It started with a guy who'd had enough
Bergen Car Company started in 2008, on a small lot off Route 46. Sal Ferrante had spent nineteen years as a service manager at a big franchise store down the highway, and he left for one reason: he was tired of watching good customers get talked into work they didn't need, and tired of being the guy who had to sign off on it.
The plan was almost too simple for a car lot. Buy decent used cars. Put a fair price on the window and leave it there. Tell people the truth about what they're looking at, even when the truth costs us the sale.
The first year was rough. We sold eleven cars in 2008 and nearly closed in 2009, when the credit markets froze and nobody could get a loan. What kept the doors open was a handful of families who came back a second and third time and sent their neighbors. That's still how most of our business walks in — someone's cousin, someone's coworker, someone whose dad bought a truck here in 2012.
Sal still comes in most mornings and still does a lot of the appraisals himself. His daughter Gina runs the place day to day now. We're still on the same stretch of Route 46, and the same idea still runs it: we'd rather lose a sale than earn a bad review.
We're not the cheapest lot in the county on every car, and we won't pretend to be. What we try to be is the one you don't have to keep your guard up at.
— Sal & Gina Ferrante, and the crew on Route 46
