Customer Satisfaction
When I first got in the car bizz, I started working at 9AM on my first day. They let us go home at 9PM. The second day, it was the same. I wasn’t really having any fun yet, I hadn’t sold a car. I kept coming in every day at 9AM and left every evening at 9PM. Well, really at night, if someone had a deal working we were required to stay until they made the deal or the customer blew out.
I finally sold my first car and then sold a bunch more. It seemed every time I talked to anyone, I sold a car. And I was getting pretty full of my self. I asked the owner one day as he walked through the showroom, “Hey Don, when do we get a day off around here?”
He looked at me, (he knew who I was, I had sold more cars than anyone in the store in the last couple of weeks) and got this completely dis-interested look on his face, and boomed in his gravelly voice, “We open at 9 in the morning and we close at 9 in the night, and it’s 10 to 7 on Sunday.” And he walked on by.
We were salesmen. We worked. But at 9PM unless we had a deal we were ready to go home. Have you any idea how many people go out to kick tires at 8:45 PM? Usually one per day (per dealership), at least. And they are there to screw up a salesman’s life. The have no intention of buying anything except a candy bar out of the machine. But they come in anyway. Then none of us can leave, someone has to up them and find out what the fuck they are thinking and the whole store is put on hold.
One of our F and I managers, who had to stay until the last drop, usually started drinking about 8PM out of the six pack of Bud he’s get at the store across the street. At 9PM he was ready to go. If someone came on the lot at 8:45, he would pick up the phone and dial the PA system and tell the would be customers on the lot that we would be closing in fifteen minutes.
“Folks, we will be closing in fifteen minutes so either get on a car deal, or go away.” And he would take another sip of his beer and wait.
It was rude and it was very crude. But that was the car business back then. There was no such thing as customer satisfaction back then. We didn’t send out surveys to judge our performance. Our performance was graded with commission vouchers. The bigger they were the better we were.
The car bizz has changed a lot. You can’t smoke in the showroom anymore, you can’t drink alcohol anymore and you certainly can’t snort lines of cocaine in the sales office. The customer is right, the dealer is wrong, and everybody has an opinion about how much a car is sold for. We have apps to show us what every body pays for their ride, we have apps that tell us what our payments will be, and the dealer will wine and dine the customer until the survey is aced. And commission vouchers are appreciably lower if there’s even a voucher.
I was glad to see the old ways go, but damn it was fun back then! You know those stories about the crazy car dealer who threw someone’s trade in keys on the roof of the building and told the customer they had to buy the car now? Yeah. And I laughed all the way to the bank.