Talk:West Coast Customs/Notes

Almost everything this company says about itself needs to be viewed as suspect. That's true of many other companies on Wikipedia, but in two major areas is it important as the company routinely attempts to rewrite history in them:

Franchises

WCC claims many more franchises than are open. It claims franchises which have closed as well as franchises which no reliable sources point to ever having opened. At [1], the company writes "We currently have franchises in Russia, Mexico, Germany, Japan and Malaysia and are currently looking at expansion in other areas of the globe." Unfortunately, this statement is being mirrored uncritically by many journalists, especially because it was in the English Wikipedia for a while until I came around and did hours of research. Literally none of the franchises on that list are still active. The German and Mexican ones closed (Berlin became insolvent, Mexico changed its name/legal entity), the Russian one never existed, and the Japanese/Malaysian ones never existed beyond a "COMING SOON!" website.

Company opening date

I have noticed a trend in the sources. When Friedlinghaus was first giving interviews about WCC, he would cite 1997/1998 as the opening year. However, these days he cites 1993. In the earliest source,[2] published in 2004 around the time of the debut of Pimp My Ride, there are two contradictory statements:

"So, six years ago, (2004-6=1998) Friedlinghaus opened his car-customizing garage, hoping to find customers desiring souped-up cars in a city popularized by famous rappers and movies featuring tricked-out rides.

and

"By the time he was 18, the car-customizing craze was beginning to take off and, with $5,000 he had saved from working at his father's liquor store in Laguna Niguel, he opened West Coast Customs in the same city in 1994."

A USA Today article from the same period also quotes 1998 as the year.

I really do believe that the company, if it existed at all, was small time until the year 1998, where business required a legal entity to be opened as it was in 2000. However, because the LA Times did also publish the year of 1994 in 2004, I've decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and put 1994 in the infobox. Further sources which quote 1993 are based on statements from Friedlinghaus or, inevitably, the previous version of this article which copied those statements uncritically, so they cannot be trusted as much as these older statements from the Pimp My Ride era. --Psiĥedelisto (talk) 03:12, 4 January 2017 (UTC)