A long time ago in a used-car lot far, far away, a man tried to sell me a Thunderbird.
I didn't want a Thunderbird. I just needed a small used family car to replace the Honda Civic wagon I'd totaled, although saying I had totaled it suggests some culpability on my part. I was just driving, slowly, on a village street in Nicholasville, Kentucky, with my small daughter strapped into he carseat in the back, when a 17-year-old girl driving a borrowed Firebird ran a red light and smashed into my car. Not my fault!
But nevertheless I bore the responsibility for finding a new car as quickly as possible while my husband was immersed in final exams for his seminary classes. So while he crammed and studied and scribbled, I hauled our toddler daughter across multiple used-car lots in and around Lexington, Kentucky.
This was in the late 1980s, when Martha Layne Collins was governor of Kentucky, suggesting that a majority of voters believed that women could do serious work independent of their husbands. However, a majority of used-car salesmen in and around Lexington did not believe that a woman encumbered by a toddler was capable of selecting a used car without her husband's approval: Why don't you come back when your husband can come with you, sweetheart?
I told every salesman the same thing: I was looking for a used minivan with the lowest mileage we could find within our meager budget. "I've got just what you need," said one salesman before leading me and my squirming toddler over to a used Thunderbird convertible, pale yellow and pristine but not by any means a minivan.
Recently someone parked a used Thunderbird convertible at the end of our road with a big "For Sale" sign on it, and every time I see it I think of the clueless salesmen who thought he could talk me into spending a pile of money on the extreme opposite of what I'd asked for. I didn't buy it then and I'm not buying it now, even if it features a red leather interior. But every time I see it, I think of that salesman and hope he'll eventually work his way out of Sales Purgatory, where salesmen who can't listen desperately try to sell worthless garbage to customers with empty pockets.
3 comments:
Sadly, I had the same experience 20 years later when I was car shopping with my boyfriend (now husband). I feel in love with him even more when he told the salesman who wouldn't look at me while he talked to my boyfriend "Don't talk to me. I'm not buying the car. Talk to her since she's the one buying."
Sad that this kind of thing still happens. Two years ago when I bought my current car I didn't have this problem, so maybe it's getting better.
It's curious to imagine what part of the male ego wouldn't want to converse with a woman when selling a car. What's there to be afraid of? Does he think, "Oh no, what if she wants to know how to hang drapes over the windows; I'm unqualified on that matter." When hiring a car salesMAN, shouldn't they cover how to sell a car to a woman!
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