4 Door Music

I was working at a BMW store for a while, selling BMWs and Volvos and mostly used cars. We had really nice used cars and sold a lot of them. We only kept cars for 90 days and then they got wholesaled, win or lose. When they were three weeks away from going to the auction or trading to a wholesaler they would put them in a special area. And there was a $500 minimum commission on them. One week away for D-Day the minimum went to $1000.

Car salesmen are nothing if not greedy and I always was. I had a guy come in one day looking for a car and I landed him on a spiff car. It was a good, nice car, but it was a 4 door Buick sedan mom and pop mobile. He liked it. He was a musician and needed the big trunk and the 4 doors.

Though I tried to sell him that day, I knew if I could get him back the next day the commission would double to the $1000 mark, so I backed off a bit and made an appointment with him to come the next day.

He didn’t show, and he didn’t answer when I called. I kept trying him, but he was gone. Next case.

Then he wasn’t. He drove in in another 4 door sedan with another dealer’s plate frames. I thought the sucker was bringing it back to gloat, but there was no happy sticker in the windshield and there was a dealer plate laying on the dash.

He told me he was test driving it. And they were letting him take it home for the night. De-horsed is what we call it in car talk. But he said he couldn’t make up his mind between this one and the one I had. I told him the one we had was scheduled to be picked up that very morning and taken to the auction, so we took it for a drive again.

I made a deal with him and took his trade in sight unseen. He had left it at the dealer he’d come from which was in the next town about thirty miles away. He wanted to take their car back to them and bring his trade, but I graciously offered to do all that driving myself.

When I got to the dealer in the next town with their ride the sales manager there told me he had told his salesman not to de-horse the guy because…well, shit happens. He shook my hand, gave me a big atta boy, and told me if I ever wanted a job, come see him.