Coffee is for closers
Eric Felten
I blame my wife for the fact that the two of us sat in a car dealership for close to three hours the other day. If it had just been me buying a used sedan, everything would have moved along swimmingly. Page after page of contractual gobbledygook would have slid across the desk in front of me, each explained by the salesman at a tempo usually reserved for stockyard auctioneers. Faced with this torrent of talk, I suspect I would have dutifully signed each page at whatever spot had been marked with yellow highlighter just to make it stop. The paperwork would have been all done in about 15 minutes.
But as I mentioned, my wife was with me, and adopting the principle of all deliberate speed, she slowed the salesman down. She inspected each and every sheet with care. Using the calculator app on her phone, she crunched every last one of the vaguely legible numbers. And each time she found an error, she tore that sheet in half to make sure it didn’t accidentally find its way back into the paperwork. It didn’t add up to much, just the difference of a few thousand dollars. That is, if one doesn’t count the few pages from someone else’s contract — papers that seem to have gotten mixed up with ours at the printer.
Curiously, none of the mistakes were to the disadvantage of the dealer. It was almost enough to make one wonder. The paperwork was duly removed to be corrected. And that’s when the waiting game began. If only we could establish an industry standard modeled on an iconic moment in Hitchcock’s Psycho.
No, I don’t mean that anyone should dress up like their aged mother and hack away at their business’s patrons. (You don’t get a lot of repeat business that way.) I’m talking about Janet Leigh’s astonishing visit to a used car lot, where we witness a transaction so wonderfully frictionless that we know there’s something very wrong going on. Leigh has stolen a brick of hundred-dollar bills from her boss in Phoenix, and she’s lamming it to California. Paranoid that a policeman is following her, she pulls into a used car lot run by “California Charlie.” The dealer tries to use his patented patter, but all Janet Leigh wants to do is grab the nearest car with California plates and get going. The deal, the paperwork, and the payoff together take four or five minutes.
Technology was supposed to get us something like that, bringing about the end of the dreaded Car-Buying Experience. But the business proves hard to change. Just check out Carvana’s stock price from this time last year to the present. Since technology didn’t do the trick, it was back to the old-school way of doing things at the dealership. And that meant facing down the Closer.
His job was not to go over the price of the car with us. That had been corrected hours before. His was the dealership’s last hope of a handsome profit. We had been made to wait as a way of softening us up for the final pitches. We were taken to a holding cell, and once we had made ourselves uncomfortable, in came the Closer. We absolutely needed the extended warranty, he insisted. It could be had with a package including prepaid oil changes. And there were a half-dozen such amenities, but I didn’t hear what they were. “Nope,” I said. “Don’t need it.” I made it a mantra.
I may have had half my day wasted, but I had the consolation that the Closer would not be having coffee.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?