A long-haired kid comes in and they don’t wait on him because they figure he’s a dreck. That’s the term they use. “Dreck” means nothing. The Jewish people brought most of the expressions in here. I jump on these kids. I try to sell ’em. Most of the long-haired kids here, their father’s a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher. They got money. They’re not hard to please. If the kid likes the car, all you have to do when the parent comes in is hit them with a little bit of logic. The kid usually wants a fast, souped-up car, a convertible more or less, with four-speed engine, all high performance. He wants the car to look real sharp. You go along with him some way, but I try to get him away from the four-speed because it’s the worst thing in the world on a car. When you trade the car in, it loses $500 if it’s a four-speed. You lose $250 in value if it’s a stick shift.
I hit them with a little logic, too. Is your mother and father gonna go for this? The insurance is gonna run a little higher. When the parents come in, you gotta go with them. You tell ’em it’s okay to have a big engine, because it’s no worse than a six-cylinder. A six-cylinder will go 80 miles an hour, that’s enough to get killed. The big engines, they go 100 to 140, but there’s no place you can do it in the city anyway. You just try to suit both parties. I learned that from life. You have to bend.
Factory people are much easier to sell. A doctor calls up and he’s a little arrogant sometimes. I want this, I want that, my buddy can get it three hundred dollars cheaper, so you better give me a good deal or forget it. They call you on the phone and want you to quote a price and everything else. That’s all fine and good, except you know their buddy can’t give ’em anything three hundred dollars cheaper. I know the prices of all the cars. That’s one of the hardest things to get across to people, that we’ve all gotta make a living.
The blue collar is easier to sell, not so much because he’s dumb, because a lot of ‘em are lots smarter than some of these psychiatrists. They’re more down-to-earth. They can’t afford to take time out and go shopping, where a doctor and a lawyer, he can take off two or three weeks at a time. The guy that works in the factory nine times out of ten, you put ’em in the car that day. If you give him a car to drive home, give him a certain amount of money for his trade-in that he’s content with, you’ve got a sale. He doesn’t care about the profit you’re making.
If you’re a real good salesman, you can put ‘em in the car that
you
want and just forget about the car
they
want. You can sell ’em the Brooklyn Bridge. Of course, I’m not that type of salesman. I’m not that far advanced. I study people, I’m still learning.
I like people. If it’s a hippie, I ask him, “Do you smoke grass? Do you take dope? Do you like this type of music?” I try to find out things to make ‘em relax. I also keep askin’ questions that they’ll answer yes. Get them in the habit of saying yes. When you say, “Will you give me the order?” they’ll say yes rather than no because they haven’t said no for a long time. “Do you like baseball? You like the way they play it today?” “Yeah.” Whatever it takes to get ‘em to say yes. A woman, you ask about fashions. Get ’em in the habit of saying yes.
Would you like to sell the Brooklyn Bridge?
No, because that would be taking advantage of someone. This may be hard to believe, but I don’t enjoy taking advantage of people. Most of the salesmen in this business, they tell you it’s a cutthroat world, you gotta screw your brother before your brother screws you. I disagree with that. I’ve been screwed many times myself because I’ve helped other people. They’ve turned around and just kicked me in the head. Rather than rebel and say I hate the world, I chalk it up to experience.
Black people, they’re the easiest to sell, the easiest in the world. If you can make them think they’re gettin’ somethin’ for nothin’, oh, they grab it quick. You give them a sharp car, man, that shines and glistens, make the neighbors think them as really big strong people, rich and all that, they eat it up. You can sell ’em one, two, three.
Worst person in the world to sell is a pipe smoker. Pipe smoker comes in, I let him go to someone else. They’ll sit there all day, kill your time. They all think they’re geniuses. They think this pipe is a symbol. And they keep asking you all these questions. They picked up a book before they came and they learned a couple of words—you know, transmission or engine or cubic inches. They try to be a professor. I just tell ‘em, “Look, did you come here to buy a car or did you come in to match wits with me?” ’Cause I’ll match my IQ with Einstein. I happen to have a very high IQ.
And Orientals, they’re another. They want something for nothing, for sure. Everybody thinks that the Jewish guy is hard to sell. Sure, he wants a break, he wants everything cheap. But he’s realistic. These Orientals and Indians, they want everything for nothing. They want to buy for less than the dealer paid for it. A Jewish person, you say, “It cost me a thousand dollars, I’ll give it to you for twelve.” They want it for eleven fifty, fine, eleven fifty. But you tell an Oriental, “Here it is, in black and white, it cost a thousand. I’ll give it to you for ten fifty.” He’ll say, “No, no, no. I want it for nine fifty. I want it for less than you paid for it.”
The black guy doesn’t care what you paid for it. He’s concerned with what he can afford. Can you keep the payments for around fifty dollars a month? Can he afford it, that’s all. But you know who I’d rather sell to more than anybody? The professional people. It’s a challenge, and I like challenges.
“I’ve always wanted to be the best in whatever I did. I would tell people, remember something as you go through life: Bosworth is Best. I even had cards printed up with that, just to joke with guys at the pool hall. Anything they could do I could do it better. That’s why I got into automobiles, the challenge.”
Say I’ve been working at this place twenty years, okay? Most people’s jobs, after twenty years you got seniority. You’re somebody. After twenty years at this job, I go in tomorrow as if I started today. If I don’t sell X amount of cars a month, I’ve gotta look for another job. It’s not because they’re bad people, but they’re in business. If you got a bad egg, you get rid of it. I don’t like it. I’m young, I’m healthy, I’m strong, I can do just about anything. But for my family, I’d like a little more security.
People are out to gain whatever they can. If sometimes it means stepping on someone, they don’t think too much about it. I wouldn’t say they’re necessarily out to take advantage of others. They’re just out for personal gain. Me, I don’t like to step on people. I’ve had money. I’ve had opportunity. I could’ve been a gigolo. I could’ve married a Jewish girl, her father is a multimillionaire. I took a pass. I’m not a goody-goody, because I’ve been in jail, I fought, I stole.
The only one that could be a threat are the people who can cost you your job. Because that would threaten my family. They can kill me. I could care less if they killed me. I like my work. I have to like it, I must like it. Otherwise I’d be miserable. It’s not what I’d like most to do, but I like it. If you’re not happy, you can’t sell. You have to be ready: let’s sell, sell, sell. You’re all gung ho.
Most people in the business drink. Mostly they talk about wine, women, and song. In some places they talk about horses, which doesn’t interest me in the least. I’m not gonna bet on four-legged animals. Most of my friends—or acquaintances—are people I’ve known for a long time. We play Monopoly, we go to the movies, go to a play like
Fiddler on the Roof.
I don’t play pool with ‘em, cause I refuse to play for nothin’. It took me a long time to get good at that game. If anybody wants to beat me, it’s gonna cost ’em money. I like gambling. I like playing cards for money.
Selling cars is a gamble. Every customer that walks in there, they’ve got a twenty-dollar bill or a fifty-dollar bill in their pocket. It’s up to you to get it out of their pocket. The only way to get it out is to sell ’em a car. It’s a gamble. If I had more education I’d be a little better at it. I wish to God I could turn back the clock and go back to school. That’s why it’s a challenge to sell a man that’s been educated, been through college. I can make him come to me instead of me going to him. They see it my way.
Could the world survive without my work? No. There has to be a salesman. Oh, if a man put his mind to it—and I’ve thought about it myseif—that could all be computerized. All a salesman does is find a car that suits you, which has the best features and which has the worst. All that can be put into a computer and you’d have a questionnaire that people would answer. The only thing that would require a salesman is the price. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people are price-conscious. That’s all they care about. You could sell ‘em a bag of potatoes if the price was right. You could sell ’em a 1948 Chevy if the price was right.
How do you feel about Ralph Nader?
Pardon me?
How do you feel about Ralph Nader?
We could do without him. He’s taken the choice away from the people. He doesn’t give them the choice of having head restraints or belts. Or having emission control systems. He took that choice away. Carbon monoxide, all that poisonous stuff, leave that to the manufacturers that know such things and what it would cost to build all that new equipment. I think he’s an alarmist. Chicken Little or whatever. He’s driving my wife crazy. She’s afraid to breathe air and everything, ’cause of him.
Sure, cars could be much better if it wasn’t for the oil companies and the gas companies. They could run on air, they could run on water—or electric. There’s no end to what they could do right now, but they won’t.
My wife’s been wanting a Volkswagen for two years and she’ll wait two hundred before she gets one. It’s an unsafe car. That’s why I watch commercials—to see if I can find something I can use in my next sales meeting with a customer. I watch how TV commercials affect people who watch it with me.
I wish the public would realize that I’m a human being, too. You meet some guy at a party and its, “Aw, you guys are all alike.” “Watch out for him,” blah, blah, blah. I tell ’em, “Stick it in your keester.” The public thinks the automobile salesman is a rat. Some of the customers are the real animals. Why must they wait? Why can’t they be number one? “How come I’m not getting good gas mileage?” They beat a car to death and they wonder why it doesn’t perform for them. All they do is make you eat your guts out. Then they’ll go right down the street and they’ll do it to another guy and they’ll wonder: Is everybody a rat? And
they’re
the rat.
They don’t have to be animals. It’s the whole system that makes ’em animals. Everybody goes on strike, they want more money. The wife needs more money to buy groceries because groceries are higher because the delivery is on strike, the trucks are on strike, the factories are on strike, everybody is on strike. The car salesman can’t go on strike. I have no union. I go on strike, I say, “I’m not gonna do this.” They say, “See if they want to hire you down the street.”
I’ve been fired from this place five times because of my mouth. And they call me back every time. They realize they were wrong. You can’t hate a man for being honest. Jesus, I feel if you can’t be honest, what’s the sense in doing anything?
BOOK FIVE
APPEARANCE
SAM MATURE
He has been a barber for forty-three years. For twenty-one years he has owned a shop at the same locale, an office building in Chicago’s Loop. “A master barber may have a couple of other barbers that are better barbers than he is, but they call him master because he’s the boss.”
Long hair is nothin’ new. We had some fancy haircuts them days the same as we have today. I did a bit of musicians and they had long hair. But not like the hippie. I have no objections as long as they keep it clean, neat, a little light trim. But you know what gets me? A fella’s got a son in college, he’s got long hair, which he’s in style. Here’s the old man, he wants to get long hair. And he’s the average age fella in the fifty age bracket. He wants to look like his son. Now that to me is ridiculous. Happens quite often. The fella’ll come in and he’ll say, “I’m gonna let my hair grow, Sam, because my daughter or my wife . . . ” Daughters and women tell their husbands how to cut their hair. The guy’s been married for twenty-five years. I don’t see the sense in him changing. We still like what they call the he-man cut. Businessman haircut. Not all this fancy stuff. It’s not here to stay.
It hurt the barber quite a bit. I know about nine barbers went out of business in this area alone. A man used to get a haircut every couple weeks. Now he waits a month or two, some of ’em even longer than that. We used to have customers that’d come in every Friday. Once a week, haircut, trim, everything. Now the same fella would come in maybe every two months. That’s the way it goes.
We used to have five chairs here. Now there’s only three of us. We used to have a manicurist here that works five davs a week. Now she works one day a week. A lot of people would get manicured and fixed up every week. Most of these people retired, moved away, or they passed away. It’s all on account of long hair. You take the old-timers, they wanted to look neat, to be presentable, and they had to make a good appearance in their office. Now people don’t seem to care too much.
You take some of our old-timers, they still take their shampoo and hair tonic and get all fixed up. But if you take the younger generation today, if you mention, “Do you want something on your hair?” they feel you insulted them. I had one fella here not too long ago, I said, “Do you want your hair washed?” He said, “What’s the matter? Is it dirty?” (Laughs.) A young guy. An older person wouldn’t do that.
In the city of Chicago a haircut’s three dollars with the exception of the hair stylin’ shops. They charge anything they want. It runs up to as high as twelve dollars. We don’t practice it. The three of us can do it but we usually don’t recommend it. We have to charge a man so much money. I don’t think it’s considerate, that kind of price for a haircut.