Life Lessons From The Car Business

If you’ve read some of my other posts on this site, you know that I spent some time, eleven months, to be exact, working in the car business. I learned a lot of lessons during my time there, some more valuable then others, but none more meaningful than how wrong it is to judge others. Not only are you usually wildly inaccurate in your preconceptions, but in constructing them you also build yourself up to be someone you are not. This is a lesson I still haven’t fully learned yet, though perhaps I will never fully get over being judgmental.

In America, where who you are is so often tied to what you drive, what you drive is seemingly of paramount importance. Nowhere is this mentality more evident than among car salesman. The minute you drive onto a car lot, the salesman busy themselves with evaluating who you are and what kind of car you might buy, as if they’ve known you for years. Are you driving a beaten ‘93 Taurus? You’re buying a Hyundai or a Ford Focus. Do you have a notebook in your hand in which you compare prices and features? You’re looking for something Japanese, probably a Subaru. Old and driving a Cadillac? You plan to keep buying American, and what model of car isn’t really important as long it looks nice and has enough trunk space for two or three golf bags.

It’s been two years since I held that job, and I can still rattle off stereotypes like that so fast I scare myself. And this kind of stuff goes on all the time. There was a simple rule that I used to go by when appraising what people bought: If their new car had fog lights, the buyer was competent and well-off. Fog lights usually only come on the top-end models of cars; hence, whatever the car, if it had fog lights, I could assume that the person knew why they wanted that specific car, and that they wanted the most car for their money. Unless their new car was already a base-model subcompact, I judged the customer could do better by downgrading to a smaller car with more options (like fog lights). Quality tends to be higher. Oh, and always buy Japanese.

It was with this mentality that one day I found myself preparing a Dodge Caravan for a customer I had not met. (My job was of the cashier-checkout sort. I made sure the customer’s car was good to go and walked them through their final paperwork.) This Caravan had zero options. Nothing. Not even automatic windows, And it was a Dodge Caravan, which tend to be at the bottom of the minivan genre in terms of quality. I could not have been less impressed with this customer’s choice and available cash.

All that changed, though, once I sat down with the customer. Instead of a overweight, lower-class white mom with unruly children, as I had expected, I was met by a smart, competent, father of five. Throughout the course of the paperwork I learned that he was a minister of a small rural church, and that this was his first new car in over ten years. I tried to concentrate on being prompt and courteous, but inside I could not have been more ashamed of myself. I identified with more characteristics in this man’s life then perhaps any other customer I had encountered, yet a half-hour before I had been joking with one of the detailers about how cleaning this car was barely worth our time. I was a horrible human being.

In an earlier post I talked about how missionaries always drove vans, and how as kids we always bragged about them. At that moment, sitting at that desk, I looked at the man sitting across from me and felt like I had practically grown up in his family. He wasn’t looking for a fancy car, because he had more important things to care about, like serving God. In all likelihood he was more concerned about being grateful to God for providing for his needs, just like my parents were and still are, than about impressing others. And there I was, judging a person’s worth by what they owned.

I drove home that night a different person from when I had woken up. Before, it was easy to play the labeling game with the salesmen. Now I didn’t care. Before, I put stock in what I drove. Now it was a car that got me from A to B, a gift God had given me that I didn’t deserve. I drove slowly, the realization washing over me that nothing I owned was a credit to my own success. Everything around me was put there to show me God - to teach me lessons.


_DZ