Get Your Trucks Here! One Buck!

 

I bought a truck for a dollar once. One U.S. dollar. It was pretty ugly but it ran, it was dirty, but it got clean, and it was cheap. A dollar.

A guy was in the Honda dealership I was the manager at and he was buying some kind of car or truck, don’t remember what, and we’d been working back and forth for a while. The salesman on the deal wasn’t getting all the money I thought the guy should pay, so I went out and talked to the guy. He was financing and I had him on the best rate available at the time even though he wasn’t a strong credit guy, and we’d been going back and forth over payment and down payment, like every deal. But he was being kind of a hard ass.

We got along well and we finally made a deal and shook hands. I went back to my office to print the paperwork, and after I had the contract printed, the salesman came in to my office and told me now the guy wanted to trade his old truck in.

There was a Mitsubishi pick-up sitting in the lot I could see and I was hoping it wasn’t that one, but knew deep down it was. My salesman pointed out the window at it and told me it was a 86 or something Mitsubishi diesel. I groaned and asked how much the guy wanted for it. What ever it was was too much.

I decided this wasn’t going to go smoothly running my salesman back and forth so I just went out and confronted the guy. I said something indicating I thought he was being a jerk for throwing a monkey wrench into a perfectly good car deal after all our work.

He actually apologized for kinking the deal, but while he was waiting for the paperwork he realized he couldn’t drive both his old truck and his new ride home. I told him I’d get it home to him, no charge. I didn’t even want to go look at it. He really didn’t want it anymore. I know that feeling so I said, “well lets go look.” And I smiled.

We were joking around and I was giggling while walking around the little beast. The bed was full of river rocks and there were extra rocks in the cab. The seat had a hungry dawg seat cover with stuffing hanging out. You couldn’t see the speedometer through all the dust and grime and you really couldn’t tell what color the truck was under all the dirt. I got him laughing with jokes about the ugly truck all while telling him that if I took it in trade it was gonna cost me $200 to sell it at the auction for $100, so I’d be losing a few hundred dollars taking it in trade.

It was all a light-hearted conversation and I blurted out, “I’ve already printed out the contract so I don’t want to change it now, but I’ll tell you what, I’d give you a dollar for it.”

And I shut up and just looked at him. He started laughing, so I did too, but I never said a word. He finally said okay and I reached in my pocket and gave him a dollar off my wad of cash.

He was happy in his new ride and we became friends. I had the kids in the shop clean up the truck and we ran it through the shop. It looked really good cleaned up. I think we put a seat cover on it and we used it for a couple of years as a parts runner truck. It got great fuel mileage, wouldn’t go fast enough to dent anything, and it cost a dollar plus some brake pads and elbow grease.

And that’s what you can get for a dollar.