Good News, Guys! Someone Wants To Pay Top Dollar For My Town Car!
Just when you think you’ve seen it all… you haven’t, apparently.
I’m not sure why they need it so desperately. Perhaps they are playing a practical joke on someone who owns a white Town Car, or perhaps they are starting up a “Scared Transverse” program to convince people not to drive RWD cars. Either way, they’re offering 110% of Kelly Blue Book!
Those of you who have worked in a dealership know how this stuff happens. It’s a dead Tuesday and some guy pulls up in a rental, demanding to see “the decision maker” at the store. Your sales manager or GM is a brilliant closer but he doesn’t have any experience with being closed himself. So, before you know it, your dealership has paid someone $25,000 to “generate leads” for you that are, shall we say, not exactly up to Alec Baldwin’s standards.
The people who come in on these letters are looking to make impossible deals; they’re worse than regular “ups” by a factor of ten. At the end of the program, the company that sold it to your store points to the increased traffic, tactfully failing to mention that sales were about what they’d been before the start of the program. Everybody gets angry, someone gets fired, and the whole shop catches a case of corporate amnesia about the thing until the next super-salesman in a rental car knocks on the GM’s door.
What’s interesting about this particular piece of direct mail is the effort put into it. How did the Post-It get written? Was it an autopen device, some robot that writes letters and Post-Its and sticks them together and mails the whole thing out? Or is it a sweatshop somewhere in downtown Los Angeles? Could it be Chinese workers across the Pacific, faithfully copying the cursive shapes from a computer screen, assembling the letters, then filling a Maersk container with their earnest weight? The possibilities are nearly endless, but most of them are not cheering.
But I don’t have time to worry about the fate of the worker bee, whether American or Chinese; I have to high-tail it to the junkyard before they feed my 110%-of-Blue-Book Townie to Murilee’s Crusher!
More by Jack Baruth
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That's an old one, it was old when I was taught it by Mr. Russel in my first job in the business, going through the orphan files at Gateway Chevrolet on Milwaukee ave. in Chicago back in the late 1970s. Old time Chicagoans may remember Mr Russel from his long running classified ads in the Sun Times for Reprocessed Cars. I wonder whatever happened to him, he was out of control, with a massive monkey on his back, but a sales machine. He taught the me a lot about life.
"I have to high-tail it to the junkyard before they feed my 110%-of-Blue-Book Townie to Murilee’s Crusher!" Did you make it in time... COL! 110% of 'No Book' is more like it. Scammers... !x%@$?>^*$*(#+-"% My son had a mobile crusher come to his place a few years ago. They crushed quite a few decent, late gen-2 'F' bodies, and Gen-3's, and a few 73' and later GM pick-ups and S-10's. I tried to tell him those 'F' bodies would start growing in popularity. Now those 73'-plus trucks are getting popular, too. But, hey! Dad don't know nuthing.