Henry Allen Fridays
part II
DEATH of the SALESMAN; We're Not Talking Loaded With Options Here. We're Talking Bottom Line on Wheeler-Dealers.
Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer
Everybody hates car salesmen.
Fine. Everybody hates everybody nowadays.
Politicians, bank tellers, funeral directors, doctors -- when's the last time a car salesman amputated the wrong leg? Journalists, telemarketers . . . What's the difference between a dead lawyer and a dead skunk in the road? Skid marks in front of the skunk. You haven't heard any car salesman jokes lately.
Guy paints a lemon on his car when it breaks down a couple of times and parks it in front of the lot where he bought it. That's his car salesman joke. Some joke. The salesman is laughing so hard he's spilling coffee all over his two-tone shoes, except he doesn't wear so many two-tone shoes anymore, or the plaid sportcoats or the sunglasses. The new thing is professionalism, certification classes and licensing, all in accordance with the first principle of the American car business -- when all else fails, try doing it well.
Let's cut a little slack for these guys.
A slowly dying breed, lying on their deathbed still saying, "If I can put you in the car you want at a price you think is fair, are you willing to drive it home today?" Like the cowboy, the carny barker: an American legend.
Six out of 10 quit every year. One guy at Sport Chevrolet in Silver Spring quit and came back so many times they named him Boomerang. Most work entirely on commission, plus the personal use of a demo. If you don't make it, you can't fake it, an average of $ 36,000 last year for guys selling cars.
And they're guys. Dealers want women, customers trust them, but they're less than one out of 10 people selling cars in franchised dealerships. Who could blame them? Horrible hours, seven days a week some places, plus the customers hitting on you: "Hey, I know this place does real Mexican, they got this garden out back with tiki torches . . ."
Plus now you're going up against buying services, buying brokers, the Internet, the one-price stores like Saturn, and even no-haggle used-car stores, like CarMax, anything to avoid dealing with car salesmen.
What's happened to this country that people don't even have the guts to bargain for a used car anymore?
It's a Tuesday afternoon. You haven't sold a car for four days. You're standing in the showroom watching the shrubbery turn yellow outside the plate-glass windows.
Six-year-old Honda comes in, finds a marked parking space. Customer. Repair people dump and jump. Customers don't want to break any rules, give you any advantage.
Sales manager says, "That's your up out there."
You study the up. "Sticker-reader," you say.
"Sticker-readers buy cars," the sales manager says.
Maybe works for the county government, something technical, that windbreaker-and-necktie look. Consumer Reports type, maybe. What they call a long-distance runner. All he wants is for this car to run until about three weeks after the world has ended.
The sales manager says: "You ever considered a career in automobile sales?"
You stroll out on the lot. You stroll past him. Keep right on strolling, like it's Ocean City on the boardwalk and you're ignoring a girl who's ignoring you. You're qualifying him the whole time, as they say, watching him read stickers while he sucks his teeth and rocks back and forth like a smart guy trying to look tough, or a tough guy trying to look smart. Wedding ring. A pair of flops -- cowboy boots so stiff you always hear them.
You see him tensing up. Scared of a car salesman, of a guy with no college, works 70 hours a week to meet child support, lives in a garden apartment with police cars in the parking lot every Saturday night.
Yankelovich Partners, which does surveys, found out that buying a car in America is "the most anxiety-provoking and least satisfying of any retail experience."
You decide to let him tense up a little more, show him he's wrong how you're going to climb all over him, hustling him.
You go back inside.
"That up is gonna walk," the sales manager says.
"Watch me," you say.
"I'm watching you," he says.
"Great, because I'm watching him," you say. You watch him walk over to used cars. You wonder if he knows a car store makes half its money on used cars, half on parts and service, and next to nothing on new cars. But you have to sell the new cars to get the parts, service and used-car business. This is a problem, but this is also America, where the solution to any economic problem is: Make it up on volume. Red-tag sales, tent sales, Crazy Al's gone even crazier -- he'll pay minimum $ 1,000 for ANY TRADE-IN even if you have to PUSH it in!!!
Right now, you're dealing with a volume of one, reading those stickers, but at least it's a sunny day. Rainy days you get the geeks, the weirdos, like last spring when you got soaked checking out every car on the lot with a pair of colorblind twins who worried if they bought a red car they'd get stopped more by the police.
You head outside again. By now the up is so tense he can hear the bones in his neck creaking.
"Can I answer any questions?"
He's standing by a two-year-old minivan, loaded, power everything.
Thin lips. Polish, maybe, or even Irish, you can't tell anymore.
"I was just at Bob Borogrove down the road," he says. He points to another string of plastic pennants, the windows reflecting in a way that makes sunlight look dirty. "Their version of the same thing, we're talking 24 valves."
"A lot of moving parts," you say. "I worked there till just after the son took over. I sold a lot of those minivans. It's an easy car to sell."
"How come you left down there?"
"Just a matter of philosophy, I guess. Mr. Borogrove was a man who knew you had to keep putting something into a car dealership, not just taking something out. Then the son takes over, he wants to do it his way, and he's got every right. Me, I've got a certain comfort level with the way I do business with people, frankly."
"Those little bubbles of paint next to the molding," the up says. He hands you a screwdriver. "I'd like you to punch that firmly with a screwdriver."
"Say what?"
"If it punches a hole all the way through, then we'll know there's some big-time rust underneath."
"You want me to punch holes in a car I'm selling?"
They get this stuff from books, like "Don't Get Taken Every Time," by Remar Sutton, whose next book was about getting into nice physical shape in the Bahamas. Punch some screwdriver holes in Remar, see what's underneath.
"If I can get you what you're looking for at a price that works for you, do you want to drive home in it today?"
Yes, he says. Of course. Why else is he here? Not many people come to car lots just for fun. And he'd look like a fool if he said no. People hate to look like fools in front of car salesmen. Which is why you asked. Keep them saying yes, and worrying they're making fools of themselves.
Test drive. Yes. Smell the leather. Yes. Talk a little rack and pinion, yes. Here we go, you feel it starting to happen, it's like sex, you're working, working, getting him to want what you want him to want.
His trade-in price comes back at $ 4,500.
"Blue book says it's worth six to nine," he says.
You say: "The blue book doesn't buy automobiles."
He says: "The bank uses the blue book."
You say: "The bank doesn't buy cars, either, it sells money."
Meanwhile, you're losing some great ups:
A country boy looking for a pickup to pull his boat, classy enough to get him on "Bassmasters" on TV. (Where do they get all that money? Did they go from moonshine to marijuana up there in the hills?) A real estate saleswoman who needs a used Mercedes or a Lincoln to haul her clients, needs it the way an undertaker needs a black Cadillac station wagon to haul his. A white-haired guy in tennis clothes comes in with his daughter -- wants to make up for the years he never called after the divorce. And a family with kids. Kids with ice cream all over their faces. You love them -- play to the kids, get them thinking they'll be driving home in a new car. Please, Daddy. Is this unfair? No. The guy wouldn't have brought the kids if he didn't want them to nag him into buying a car. People want to be sold. You make it happen for them.
Some stores, you'd turn the Tuesday afternoon minivan sticker-reader over to a closer who'd turn him over to the F&I man who does the finance and insurance, and then hit him with the after-market girl for the paint sealer, the undercoating and the fabric care, sometimes known as "rust 'n' dust," or "the sandwich." Here, you do it yourself.
"Just tell me what the car costs," your minivan guy says.
"Where do you want to be?" you say.
You hope he'll talk monthly payments. No up can keep length of payment, interest rate, down payment, amount of payment and credit insurance going in his head all at once. You punch numbers on the calculator. Used to be more impressive back when it was an adding machine, kachunga kachunga like a certified public locomotive coming down the tracks, the old Friden adding machine they called the "Okie charmer."
"Right now I'm paying off a boat and my wife's back in school for dental hygiene . . ."
Okay, payments. Beautiful. You're in control. Which is as it should be, you're the professional here.
He looks around. The plaques for Salesman of the Month. The picture of your daughter with braces, your little boy wearing pajamas with feet in them, cute. Good for what's known as the "puppy dog close."
"I can't make a decision like this without talking it over with my wife," the guy says.
You hand him your telephone, bang, like that, crisp, a decision noise, make him feel like a little bit of a wussy.
"Call her," you say. "Feel free to talk as long as you want. As long as she doesn't live in Hawaii. Just a joke. I'll be talking to the manager. I'll see what I can do. He just quit smoking again, he's taking it out on everybody, and the numbers you're talking, frankly . . . But let me try, I think you're close to putting a very good deal on the table."
You can't find the manager. You get another salesman and ask him to play manager if you need him. You go outside and smoke a cigarette, listen to the traffic.
This is nowhere. This is the same highway that's on the edge of the same town all over America, fast food, miniature golf, video stores, gun stores and the car dealerships with a provisional look, buildings that look like nobody looks at them, as if they might vanish if it weren't for the strings of plastic pennants.
You go back inside. That seedy feeling like recruiting offices, Army, Navy, Marines . . . recruiting sergeants have that way of intimidating people just like car salesmen, come to think of it. Strange, selling somebody something by making them feel anxious. Well, it works for Tiffany, Brooks Brothers . . .
Your up is reading the numbers on your legal pad, showing you he's not scared of you.
"We're in luck," you say. "I just saw the manager smoking a cigarette out back, I'll walk you over to his office and I think he's gonna be dealing, I'm feeling very good about this."
"Here's my problem," the guy says. "I gotta pick up my kid at Little League."
"We'll pick him up and let him have his own test drive, a family affair," you say. It's going bad, you can feel yourself smiling and frowning at the same time, forcing it. The up looks ashamed of himself, he looks sad. You hate that look.
"We gotta go grocery shopping right after," he says.
This is pathetic. The next thing, he'll promise he'll be back. A be-back, they call them.
"Tell you what, you here tonight?" he asks. "About 8 o'clock I can come . . ." "I want to level with you," you say. "I want to sell you a car. And you're a man who wants to buy a car -- am I right? -- or else we wouldn't have spent all this valuable time together."
"Yes," he says.
You lean forward. You cup your hands around air as if you're handing him the Topkapi emerald, the one about the size of a softball.
"Then that puts us on the same side!" you whisper. "Am I right?"
"Yes, no, I don't know. You guys get all this stuff going."
So he isn't afraid to look stupid in front of you anymore. A bad sign.
"I want to ask you a favor, now, a personal favor," you say. "When my sales manager sees you walk out of here, he's going to ask me what went wrong, did I try to high-pressure you, what -- "
"I told you, if I can break away, I'll be back . . ." he says.
"Sit down with the manager, it would mean a lot."
If I can get you the car you want, the deal you . . . Gone.
Losing Ground
You don't lose just him, you lose the next guy, and the guy after that. Best time to sell a car is when you just sold one. You're hot. In America, you sell the sizzle, not the steak. You don't want to look hungrier than the customers. Pretty soon you're pushing too hard, going for easy kills and when people look at you they see a sheep-killing dog. Would you buy a used car from that man?
What you're really selling is yourself. Guys will say: "You take off their clothes and put them on you."
Some ups even come in and they say, "Give me your number one salesman." What sense does that make? That's like a Christian asking for the hungriest lion.
The Adversaries
Your kid turns on TV, it's the movie "Breaking Away" where the ups are pushing the lemon Corvette back onto the lot and the owner is trying to push it off and shouting, "Refund!? Refund!?" Or "Cadillac Man," which opens with Robin Williams interrupting a funeral to pitch the widow. Later, in a hostage situation at his dealership, the funeral director leaves him his card when he escapes.
Or "Used Cars," which starts with a mechanic spinning back the mileage to the tune of "The Stars and Stripes Forever," and a car being repainted to hide the fact it was a taxi, and Kurt Russell in a plaid sportcoat saying, "You're thinking, 'Can I afford to buy this car?' You can't afford not to!"
Or "Fargo," where the weenie car salesman hires two men to kidnap his wife.
Nobody makes movies about the ups who are liars and losers and be-backs.
"We'll be back," they say.
"My credit's good," they say, losers whose furniture is sitting on a sidewalk, and they need this car as a place to sleep tonight.
Last year an ex-salesman named Joseph Valentinetti published a crime novel with a car salesman as hero and a car buyer as a villain. It was called "Glint," and the hero talks about lying awake at night, thinking about ups: "Our whole business depends on getting people to keep the . . . promises they make."
No love lost on either side. This is the Mexican standoff of the car business. It's gotten so bad that the National Automobile Dealers Association sends trainers around trying to make peace, get the salespeople's grievances out in the air and do something about them, as in the New York Times describing a trainer shouting the challenge to a meeting room of salespeople: "What do we say about buyers? All buyers are -- what?"
"Liars!" the salesmen roar back.
This is like a roomful of doctors shouting that all their patients are hypochondriacs. You see people that way, you can get to hate them.
Perfecting the Pitch
Where did it start? In the recession of 1921-22, Henry Ford built more cars than he could sell. He didn't want to borrow money to maintain inventory -- he had this phobia about Wall Street and Jews -- so he shipped his extra cars to his dealers COD, which meant the dealers had to beat up on the salesmen. Sell or die.
"Those sons-of-bitches over there ain't buying," says the car dealer in John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath." What other business hates its customers? "Over there, them two people -- no, with the kids. . . . Like to get in to see that one? Sure, no trouble. I'll pull her out of the line. Get 'em under obligation. Make 'em take up your time. Don't let 'em forget they're takin' your time. People are nice, mostly. They hate to put you out. Make 'em put you out an' then sock it to 'em."
Everybody has his own idea about when it went wrong.
Cal Worthington, a California dealer out of the pitchman school, making a fool of himself on TV, has said it went wrong after World War II when there were too few cars, not too many the way it was with Ford. Customers would pay more than the asking price to drive away into the American Century. And hate the salesman for gouging.
In 1946, Detroit retooled and made about 1.5 million cars. In 1950, it sold 6 million; then sales dropped a million in '51 and another million in '52. Leon Mandel, who publishes AutoWeek and sold cars in the '50s, says things went terminally bad then -- the mooch ads with dealers slapping fenders, eating money, Crazy Al taking a sledgehammer and smashing a windshield with a price painted on it.
Bad credit? No credit? Come on down!
Make it up on volume.
A Ford dealership in Memphis, named Hull-Dobbs, invented something still known as The System.
Take the customer's trade-in and if he tried to leave, tell him the keys had been lost. This was known as "throwing the keys on the roof," and salesmen will swear they knew a guy who worked in a place that actually threw them on the roof -- one of those folk tales everybody wants to believe, even the villains. The same way you hear about dealers who check out the preset buttons on the trade-in's radio so the salesman knows what the up listens to, and the next thing they're talking jazz or revival preaching.
Anyhow, The System passed the customer from one person to another, talking credit, payments, options, trade-in, a dozen deals going at once.
So what? People wanted to own cars, whether they needed them or not, and if you were a salesman you needed to sell cars whether people wanted them or not. Car salesmen just made the market between wants and needs, got people to stop whining and start signing.
It's not a question of needing a Cadillac, Mr. Jones. People need flatbed trucks, they need cheap transportation. But people drive Cadillacs because they deserve them. It's a subtle point, but I think you're at a stage in your career, your standing in the community, where you appreciate it. We're talking about a different class of automobile, Mr. Jones, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're ready for it. This is why the Cadillac is a thrill. Did anybody ever come up to you and say, 'Hey, you hear about Jack down the street? He just bought a Buick?' "
The Real Deal
America used to be the main chance, bet your bottom dollar to lose your blues. There was a saying during the Depression, when everybody was scared: Even a turtle has to stick his neck out to get anywhere. Now, people think they shouldn't have to take any risks, although, it's true, there are a lot more risks you have to take. The median family in 1996 needs more than six months to make enough money to buy a new car, compared with four months in 1979.
And cars don't cure the blues the way they used to. They started out like televisions half a century later: rich men's toys, then luxuries, then status symbols, then conveniences, and now necessities. People used to take the train to Detroit to pick up their new cars, and now they buy them like plastic razors at the 7-Eleven.
Like a woman walks in with cash, says I want this car, this price, now. Great, an easy commission, but you're a car salesman, not a shoe clerk or a valet parking attendant. You have your pride.
Besides, how are you going to make anything on the back end with somebody like this? Salesmen are told to put romance into the car, they want to put romance into the car, what the hell are they there for if they're not "building value," they call it, doing a "six-point walk-around" like a magician introducing six lovely assistants. But everybody knows how the trick is done. They read about it in books with authors like you used to see on religious tracts -- W. James Bragg, good old Remar Sutton. They read the Power guide, Edmund's new car prices, the Gousha guide. They watch videotapes like "Don't Gamble on Buying a Used Car." They tell you they know how the game is played, then they expect you not to play it.
On the other hand, you get three nuns walk in. You do the walk-around. The mother superior looks at the sticker and says, "My, that certainly seems like a good price." You feel terrible, you're taking candy from a baby. You tell her she can get it for less. Later the sales manager rips you apart, calls you names you haven't heard since boot camp.
Valentinetti, who wrote the novel about the car salesman, says what got him out of the business was a couple who came into a dealership in Alta Loma, Calif., people who were happy to play the game his way.
He says: "I got them to agree to a payment schedule so high that when I checked it out with the manager, I realized we were getting $ 400 a month for a car that wasn't worth any more than $ 300, no matter how much we loaded on the back end -- credit insurance, extended warranty, the alarm system, the car phone, whatever. I had to go back and tell them I'd charged them too much. That depressed me."
They loved him for it, he hadn't done anything illegal, they drove home happy, but there are times in this business when you drive home feeling bad and not sure why. The problem is the rules you never think or even know about till you break them, and you can't solve it by making it up on volume. Like, once you walked past a blind man selling pencils, 10 cents each, and you dropped a buck in the cup and then you went back and took one of the pencils. Later on, you felt bad. What had you done wrong?
On the other hand, the customers that want to play your game, they keep you there all day -- people from countries where bargaining is a way of life, where "profit" isn't a dirty word. Like "red dots," which means Indians specifically but it's the same with people from Turkey to China.
They know any fool can buy a car at dealer invoice, nowadays. They want to get into the holdback, which is money the manufacturer sends the dealer at the end of the year for each car sold. Then they want a piece of the dealer pack, which is a profit trick even a lot of salesmen don't understand.
Lot of Americans get squeamish. They'll pay an 11 percent markup on a no-haggle Saturn when they could be getting another car at cost. These are the same people who are scared of blackjack dealers in casinos, too, so they'll take a huge beating on the odds and play the slot machines.
Car dealers are trying to change, but it's hard. There's the whole culture of the car business -- the companies, the salesmen, tradition. A lot of dealers are the children and grandchildren of dealers -- car stores are one of the most inherited businesses in America, along with funeral homes and newspapers. Strange -- they all make people nervous.
In Marlow Heights, a dealer named Jeff Pohanka is running the business his grandfather started in 1919.
He and his father have Pohanka Saturn just across St. Barnabas Road from Pohanka Honda and down it from Pohanka Hyundai-Suzuki, Pohanka GMC Trucks, Pohanka Isuzu, Pohanka Oldsmobile, Pohanka Subaru and Pohanka Auto Outlet (used cars).
His theory about people hating car salesman is, number one: "If people understand what you do, they always think they can do it better, so they look down on you."
Number two: "Measurement factors. Everything is measured, now. The J.D. Power company comes along and starts measuring new-car customer satisfaction, and pretty soon everybody is trying to move up in the ratings."
So why doesn't Pohanka tell all his stores to operate like the Saturn store he's standing in right now? Saturn was second only to Lexus for new-car buyer satisfaction in the latest Power survey.
He says: "There are cultures in place. Or you don't get support from the manufacturer. It's very hard to change."
At Saturn, they do celebrations for each buyer, Pohanka himself getting out there right now to gather with his staff around a buyer who just took delivery at "Inspiration Point." Saturn tries to set up showrooms so the new owners can drive them off the floor and out into the world themselves, while the staff takes pictures and cheers: "S!A!T!U!R!N!"
Hard to imagine the old dealers in the plaid sportcoats doing the Saturn cheer -- the guys who didn't know much about the Measurement Society or satisfaction surveys, but sold enough cars that they could leave the dealership to their kids and retire to working on the art of hitting a golf ball and smoking a Cuban cigar at the same time.
The buyers are just as hard to change. An ultimate terror haunts them in the Measurement Society where genital size, speeds of thrown baseballs and the percentage of 14-year-olds able to name the secretary of state are all subject to endless brooding -- the ultimate terror being envy.
So a buyer holds his hands between his knees, and nickel-and-dimes you to death because the worst thing that could happen is he goes to work the next day and somebody in the next office says, "Hey, I bought the same car. What'd you pay for yours?"
He tells him.
"That's a good price. That's a very good price. I got mine for $ 300 less, but don't get me wrong, that's a very good price, believe me."
People lie awake at night thinking about this stuff.
The next time that first guy looks for a car, he'll drive on the lot in his windbreaker and cheap cowboy boots, take up your whole day, then shop it to another dealer and get it for $ 40 less. He took a $ 200, $ 300 commission away from you to get one quarter of a percent less on a $ 16,000 car because somebody punched his envy button three years ago.
In the satisfaction surveys from the dealers, manufacturers and consumer analysts, the same question keeps coming up, one way or another: Is this product a value to you at the price you paid for it?
But what are we learning here? Isn't this where the whole deal started?
If I can get you what you want at a price you think is fair, are you ready to deal today?
Yes. Of course. Quid pro quo. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. The love you take is equal to the love you make. Goes around, comes around . . . as ye sow . . .
If the answer is no, the whole system is in trouble, the American way is in trouble. O say does that star-spangled car deal . . . Maybe the whole human race is in trouble.
But the answer, of course, is yes.
