Toys N Shit

When I was the manager at the Honda dealership, the owner was a short guy. He was young, (his early thirties then), but brilliant. And built to succeed. And he usually did. I don’t know that it was a “short man syndrome” but he had drive and success in his front pockets and he was a little guy.

We were in a small Northern California town and there was a dealer group there of all the dealers. Since we were basically a one line store, (we had the Isuzu franchise as well, but that’s like having an anchor on the pier, it stops nothing but weighs everything down). All the rest of the dealers had more lines of product and most of them were on the other end of town.

We were out off the main grid of town, but we had freeway frontage right at the first exit in town coming from the south. And our store was old, the parking lot was half paved and most of it was gravel, the buildings were old, and we were at the end of the road we were on. And in the past, before we go there, the store sold insignificant numbers of cars and was a perennial money loser.

We started selling a lot of cars. In fact we were filling up our acres with hundreds of new cars and the other dealers in town didn’t know what were we doing to generate all the action. And the other dealer owners didn’t really like us and my boss was considered sort of an outsider.

Part of my job was dealing with the dealers association for any of the business we had with them. Every year, the dealer association would host a “New Car Show” at the fair grounds. It would be a three or four day affair and we would have parties, food, show our finest cars, and hopefully sell some rides.

We were having a planning meeting, and all the owners were there, the Ford guy, was a dealer development dealer so he wasn’t all the way part of the good ole boys, but he’d been around for a while. The biggest dealers were the guy who owned the Cadillac, GMC dealership. He was the big guy there, been there forever and was still riding GM’s dominance from the 60s and 70s. The Toyota guy had Chevy as well so he was a biggie too. And there were another few guys who had been in the bizz in town for years and years who owned all the rest.

We were talking about how we would dress for the event and as some of it would be televised on news casts and advertisements, everyone seemed to be in favor of all the dealers wearing tuxedos. Personally, I was into polo shirts and blue jeans, but I don’t think I said that. I would imagine that’s how I was dressed for the meeting. So, I was sitting there thinking about what would be entailed for me to get a tuxedo, and probably thinking about where I would change when I came back to the store, because I don’t hang out at parties like that and I don’t wear tuxedos. The Toyota guy, Dennis, pipes up and says real loudly, “Ken, tell John, (my boss) he can get a tux at Toys R Us. They’re cheap.”

I think I told him he could call and tell him.

John sold the Honda dealership to Dennis later and made enough money for two lifetimes, I bet. And Honda made him build a new store.