A Quarter at a Time

If you’ve been a salesman in a dealership you are familiar with slow and no traffic through the store, I’m sure. Even busy stores have lulls and slow stores have well…slowness, no customers, no advertising, no specials, no deals, and lots of free time.

And gambling. Yea, gambling. If you put a bunch of miscreants together with nothing to do but bitch about how slow it is, the result will be gambling. Cards, betting on the color of the next car to drive in, dice, sports pools, betting on the cardboard coffee cups that come from the coffee machine, (the ones with the playing cards on them), and pitching quarters.

I came in to the dealer on my day off for an appointment to sell a car one afternoon. It was slow. There was a crew of five there plus me and a couple of closers and the desk guy and we were doing the salesman thing, standing, smoking, telling crude and rude jokes, drinking coffee, and wishing all those sales seminar leeches would send some ups in to buy a car. It was too early in the day to start a card game; we might miss an up if we were in the conference room where we kept the cards and chips. So we did the next best thing.

A few of us started pitching quarters. We had a big showroom completely surrounded by big floor to ceiling windows. At the bottom of the windows there was an aluminum frame that made a little two inch ledge about two inches off the floor. We were pitching, trying to be the closest to the frame. Closest quarter wins all. Someone threw one that bounced and landed on the ledge.

Price decided we should up the stakes a bit. He was always the guy who wanted to bet on everything, bluff on some, and hold em when he was working you and it was natural for him to figure out how to make the pitching a bit more interesting…and expensive.

So we made some new rules. If you tossed a quarter on the ledge you win it all plus double. And if it landed heads up, triple. We put some other qualifiers on it, like if you leaned against the ledge or leaned against the glass on the ledge it was more. Pretty soon we were getting to real money. And I was getting good at it. Most of the time I bounced it on the ledge and a fair number of times it showed up heads.

My appointment never showed. I tried to call them and they didn’t answer so I decided I’d play a few more tosses and take my fifty dollar winnings home.

Everybody was tired of pitching quarters and went to do other nonsensical salesmen things, like smoke, drink coffee, snort a line, or whatever and soon it was just Price and me pitching quarters.

I pitched one on the ledge that leaned against the glass that paid like five times. And in the next ten minutes I had won a bunch in a row. I was ready to go and resume my day off and I was about forty bucks up on Price. So he said, lets go double or nothing.

We did and I landed on the ledge, tails up for he owed me triple. He wanted to go again, so I did, and I won again. I was ready to leave, but he wanted one more chance. I was about two hundred bucks up then. I went one more with him, double or nothing and landed on the ledge, tails up. Triple. He owed me about six hundred dollars.

He paid me the next day. I know it hurt when he did, but he was a good gambler and always paid up.

One of my more profitable days off. If you think about it, commission sales people gamble every day. We like it, we make a living at it, so pitching quarters is just natural. And they don’t teach that in college.