We had a new owner buy into the Buick dealership where I worked in the early 80s. He was a tall, slender, handsome man in his late forties. He dressed the part, all shiny suits with the finest in shoes and belts and ties. He had been the GM at a very successful Chevy dealership in the Bay Area, now he was the owner of a fairly successful Buick/Chrysler Dealership group. Bob was personable and after a few weeks of him being around, I realized we would be fine. He stayed out of the way and let us all do our jobs without too much micro-managing and we were selling cars.

But one of his first moves to cut costs was to trim the advertising budget. He got off the radio and TV and cut the print ads significantly. Immediately sales started slacking off. One might imagine that a good manager would notice the correlation between ads and sales, especially when the guys who had been doing it for years told him the lack of advertising was killing us. But, Bob, had different ideas about how to fix it.

He introduced us to our new “Floor Manager.” It was his wife. We all knew her. I always think it’s funny when I see a beautiful person, such as our boss, Bob, paired with the ugliest of the human variety. And this pair was exactly that. She was dumpy, frumpy, short, and ugly. And to make up for it she was loud, obnoxious, covered herself in gaudy jewelry and cheap perfume. She wore loud clothes and outrageous hi-heeled shoes. And she knew nothing about much of anything. But she was going to straighten us out. She told us what to do and when to do it, re-arranged our schedules and crews, and even went so far as to change the way we had our lot arranged. I never figured out if any of the changes had a point in her mind or if she was just changing crap to do it.

But the way we had to arrange the lot, meant we had to move more cars to get to some cars, and the cars on the front line were parked backward to the street. We arranged them by color, white ones over there, and blue ones in a little group and so on. I’d always learned to mix the colors, but that was out the window now. She actually had her hubby order some special order yellow Regals because we only had one yellow one and it was lonely. The reason we had one yellow one was because someone screwed up and ordered it. They did not sell…Ever.

She never did anything to set up any kind of program to increase sales, instead was more worried about how the offices were arranged, what pictures we had on our desks and what color pens we used to fill out credit apps. She demanded we use blue ink even when she was told the banks want everything in black pen. we had to go buy new ink cartridges for our Cross ballpoints.

Business sucked. It was winter, the new year cars had been out for a while and were old hat, we had a couple of stray leftovers from the year before, little in the way of good used cars, (she nixed every trade we took if it wasn’t a color she liked, and she really liked yellow and green, but white and blue or silver was taboo. We had a lot full of sale proof cars, a full load of demoralized salesmen, and pictures of the owner and his wife on our desks.

Bob wouldn’t step in though he was told over and over by the same guys who made the store a success, which was why Bob bought the place. We languished and I’d had enough. Then she decided she would be the sales manager and fired the guy who’d been there for years. She didn’t know the first thing about how to sell a car, so I’d determined that if it didn’t change soon, I was gone.

I was at the up desk on the showroom one morning and I had a phone pop. Someone wanted to come in and look at a particular used car we had and I was talking to him. I was listening to the man and Ms. GM, the boss’s wife, walked up to me, told me to get off the phone and go “Get a nice looking Regal and put it out on the point. I was pointing at the phone and making motions to tell her I was on the phone. She reached over and hung up the phone. I was flabbergasted.

I said to her, “Lorraine, where can I find a ‘nice looking Regal'”? I told her all we had were ugly ones. By then there were a few salesmen hanging out listening and they all started laughing because that’s what salesmen do. She got mad. When it was over she was screaming at her husband on the showroom floor demanding I be fired. I was always the top one or two guys there every month, but she wanted me gone. I went and got my license off the board and quit.

I called my buddy who owned a used car lot, got a job, a demo, draw, and day off and left when he came and picked me up. Bob called me weekly trying to get me back, but I was having fun where I was and making some money so I never went back. He kept that dealership for a while, but never got it back in the money-making mode and finally sold it. He bought another small dealership in a little ho-dunk farming town. I ran into his at the car auction years later and he bought a few cars from me over the years. He never failed to apologize to me for his wife every time he’d see me. But she didn’t work in his dealership anymore, he said he learned his lesson. I bet that was a painful painful firing.