Grand National
I was sitting in my office on a weekday early one morning at the Buick dealership, going through my leads and making my sales calls. It was quiet like it always was in the morning. Usually the only people on the showroom floor were service customers and there was a well dressed woman looking at the Buick Grand National sitting on the showroom floor, and I could tell she was a service customer but no one was talking to her so I went out and started up a conversation. She looked familiar and I remembered she had bought a car from us not long before. She told me she was in for her three thousand mile check up and her car was out in the shop. I asked and she told me it was a new Regal Limited, and I vaguely recalled when she and her husband bought it a few months before from another salesman.
She said to me as she gazed at the black Grand National Regal., “I really love this car, I wish you had it when we bought ours.”
I started talking about the car, but she wasn’t interested to know that is was the fastest car you could buy at the time, or the contoured buckets that were only available on that car, or the other cool hot rod things that made it a Grand National. She just liked the way it looked. A lot
Car guys know this, but we can tell when someone has the serious “gotta gets.” She had them big time, so I asked if she would like to drive it and she said, “No, I just want to buy it.” And she asked if I thought we would take her brand new Regal in trade.
When it was all said and done an hour later, we took her brand new car in trade, and she lost thousands on it, and sold her our car for appreciably over sticker. She wrote a hefty check for it. I asked a couple of times if her husband needed to be involved, and she told me no as many times as I asked. As I remembered, her husband was a big guy, owned a local crane operator business, and I worried some about that, but we sold her the car, she was happy, I was happy, my boss was happy, and my bank account was going to be happy.
Well, a few days later, on Saturday morning just at opening time, I see the black car driving into the dealership. It was Mr., and he got out, slammed the door, and walked up to our door. I held it open for him wearing my big congratulations smile and he asked if I was Ken Burnett. I said yes and he asked where my boss was.
He was pissed, and you could hear him screaming at the Ford store down the street, I’m sure. I stood outside the sales office while he slammed me, the dealership, God and country, and then my boss, his boss, and finally Don McCullough, the owner. My boss told him, in no uncertain terms that the deal was done, and there wasn’t anything we could do for him. We had already sold her trade-in, so he offered the guy a few free oil changes.
I heard him scream at the top of his lungs that the car was a piece of shit and started cutting out at six thousand RPMs, and he wanted it fixed. The Grand National had a rev limiter that wouldn’t let it rev more than six thousand RPMs, but there was no satisfying the guy, so my boss told him to bring it in on Monday and the shop would look at it.
The guy stormed out, tried to slam our front door, but it had a heavy duty closer on it and wouldn’t slam, so he kicked it, jerked his car door open, slammed it shut, backed up, and burned rubber all the way down the street about a quarter of a mile, smoke billowing out from the back tires and fish-tailing down Cirby Avenue as far as I could see. Who says that the 80s were bad for performance cars?