Ford can say whatever they want, Dealers can order whatever they want, all this means is ford telling the dealers the rebates and other "deals" to move old stock are going away. Nothing more.
Right. Ford is feeling froggy with supply chain as an excuse for the sellers market right now. They're *love* to keep inventories lower than they have been historically. They'd love to shift the cost burden of buffering that inventory more toward the dealers. But dealers already operate on thin margins. They can't carry dead stock and they can't afford to give up those impulse buys.
Right, now start paying the bills, and see how thin that margin is. You can always tell those that never owned or ran a business.
Dealer margin is right about 5-6% (dealer cost is also shown on Z plan invoices) depending on how the vehicle is optioned, still a good chunk of change based on the price of current vehicles, plus their "doc fee" of course. The real profit for a dealership is service (non-warranty) and insurance claims (body shop). I have been buying new Fords since I was 19, and over the last 30 years have purchased close to 30 new vehicles for myself and my wife, and have a pretty decent repore with my dealership (same dealer 4 sales people in that 30 years)...and I was told the current "shortage" of cars on lots is Ford is putting everything into the F150 line at the moment, as they are terrible afraid to lose to Dodge this model year for the best selling vehicle, as the Ram is somewhat close to taking that title and Ford has laser focus on keeping that for the 45th year in a row...they know they are going to lose money this year, but they don't want to lose that title. They have dropped FM Credit interest on the F150 series to 0% for 72 months (which is a first, while the Mustang remains at 3.9 for the same term), and has gone as far as to incentivise dealers to sell the current stock, or threaten them...which everway you want to look at it, but if an F150 is sitting on a dealers lot for more than 3 weeks, Ford is reaching out to them asking why it has not sold and do they need buy it back and send it to a different dealership. I think using the JIT model at this point Ford is really just hiding the fact that they can't keep up with production, and that sounds better than "sorry, we just can't build enough cars" on paper, but I would suspect that once the shortages end, and supply chain is back up, Ford will have a change of heart and allow dealers to stock as much as they want. Model year end rebates and incentives are built into their marketing strategy and budget planning, and they know that, and they also know that impulse car buyers make up a large portion of their new car sales, and removing those "incentive sales" will cost them a lot of market share. Their only real hope to keep a JIT model is if every other manufacturer does this also, or they drop their standard pricing on all vehicles to make the wait worth the inconvenience of a normal market 6-8 week lead time worth it.
Heh .................. Wanna see empty ? Go take a look at McDavid out on the west side of Ft Worth.
The majority of vehicles at 5 Star in N Richland Hills are used. They took in a gorgeous low milage '19 GT350 the other week. It lasted a whole day ! 
My grandfather used to tell me when he bought his first Ford you had to order the car and wait a couple of weeks. He preferred being able to order it the exact way you wanted it though.
What my dad did. Dealer was in an old quonset hut type building.
Flip books with color swatches. Back then, there were no packages. It was like ordering Chinese food .............. 
Yup, many dealers are not going to make it pass this quarter when they miss paying the bills.
And most worked near their home, so if they had no wheels, they could walk or ride a bike. Today, many have jobs 10-50+ miles from home or more, if your vehicle gets wrecked or tosses it's cookies, you can't wait weeks or months for a replacement.
