Car dealership stories

October 14, 2005 1:01 PM

What's it like to be Jerry Lundegaard selling Oldsmobiles?

Any current or former car salespeople willing to share stories about customers, co-workers, employers or the cars they sold. Dumb things buyers did? Financing "slight of hand". Tricks of the trade? How can buyers play the game and gain an advantage?

posted by punkfloyd to grab bag (9 comments total)

Confessions of a Car Salesman is supposedly good.
posted by driveler at 1:04 PM on October 14, 2005

Selling Cars in the US. Pardon the self-link. I didn't write the story, I just run the site. :-)
posted by rusty at 1:18 PM on October 14, 2005

That Edmunds.com story linked in the first comment is a very worthwhile read. Longish for a web article, but informative. More about the slimy way the dealerships use up salespeople than about how to beat the dealer when buying, but very illuminating on the whole situation.
posted by briank at 1:21 PM on October 14, 2005

You might be interesting in checking out The Slasher - it's a pretty entertaining doc about a mercenary used car salesman. I believe Netflix carries it.
posted by milkrate at 1:33 PM on October 14, 2005

I know a car dealer. They have (or had) a piece of software that does the car configuration, works out your financing options, etc. Very useful for salesperson and buyer alike. The trick is that the "clock" in the upper corner of the screen (it was a character-mode app) showed hour, minutes & seconds - 3:42:23 - except the seconds field actually showed the dealer's profit, in hundreds of dollars.

No competent dealer will sell a car at a loss. Regardless of what you bargain for, the dealer will make a profit. Perhaps the manufacturer is taking a loss (GM, et al) but the dealer - never.
posted by GuyZero at 1:38 PM on October 14, 2005

This is a pretty good (humorous) movie on the more pushy kind of used car sales. I reccomend anyone starting up a new small business watch that movie for the amount of pressure you should be putting on yourself for sales the first few months.
posted by shepd at 1:49 PM on October 14, 2005

I can't believe no one's mentioned the seminal used car movie yet. Absolutely hilarious.
posted by any major dude at 8:00 PM on October 14, 2005

I was an independent contractor working for a third party who was based in a couple of car dealerships a couple of years back.

One is among the largest dealerships in the Chicago area and has very swank, corporate quarters and a soft-spoken, friendly staff. Another was a battered, beat-up place in the south 'burbs that catered to a minority clientele and pushed them through like Ellis Island. It didn't matter; both of them were slimy as hell and I'd never do that again in a million years.

The "respectable" place had behind-the-scenes negotiations about purchasers that would curdle your blood -- it was all about "putting someone in a car", and many times they knew they wouldn't be able to make the payments, but they'd be able to make the numbers work anyway. The worst credit records you'd ever seen, and they'd still get in a car that day. The salesmen would bet on the odds that they'd "get that car back" in two or three months. And this was the nice place.

There were some salesguys who did well enough. Almost every single one of the saleswomen was doing fantastically well, which either says something about the value of sex appeal or something about how long women will work in soul-destroying jobs. But most of them were an act or two away from Glengarry Glen Ross territory. Rented suits, borrowed vehicles. One guy came to the car dealer by bus and had to walk half a mile.

The joke was on me, though. Once my boss was on the phone with the dealership manager, and the dealer ended up saying to my boss, "You're a slippery guy!" He was soooo right.
posted by dhartung at 10:09 PM on October 14, 2005

I used to work with salesmen, and they liked to use what they thought of as cunning psychological tricks on the customers, some of which they learned from sales "gurus" who gave talks and wrote books.

One of the simplest was just getting the customer to say "yes" to the car, in any way, and I had this trick used on me not long ago -- you might ask "If you were buying, do you want this car in red or blue" in the belief that the act of them saying "I want it in blue" would somehow reprogram them into thinking they'd already agreed to buy it.

Or if the car was on sale for ten grand, they'd say "Put it this way -- would you buy it if it was only five grand?" Of course you would, but again, the act of tricking you into saying "yes" was supposed to make you somehow fall under their hypnotic spell.

They would often talk about deciding which of a couple wore the pants, and selling to that person, and also they would use NLP "tricks" like finding out if you were a sound person or a vision person. If your psychology was more auditory, saying "I think when you hear about the discounts you'll be happy" as opposed to "when you see the discounts" for a visual type person.

The canonical salesman trick is for him to say the price is X, but he might be able to get it for you for less, but he'll have to talk to his boss and get him to agree. This makes him the good cop, somehow. He's helping me get this car by convincing his boss, what a nice man.

I have no idea whether any of this stuff actually worked, all I know is that the sales guys believed it.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 11:06 PM on October 16, 2005