CAR BIZ CURIOSITY

FEBRUARY 21, 2021 – Yesterday I spent two-and-a-half hours transacting business at a car dealership. During long waits, I had no choice but to observe and ponder the goings-on around me—I can’t stand wasting time just “waiting,” which is why I take writing and reading material wherever I go, but yesterday, I’d forgotten. (Beyond a minute or two, my smartphone screen isn’t an acceptable alternative.)

Here’s what I saw:

1. Despite some gains toward gender equality, the retail car biz is still a man’s world;
2. Despite nearly a full year of pandemic, a lot of 50-ish men haven’t learned that the mask goes over the nose, as well as the mouth;
3. Despite a digital world, there’s still lots of paperwork associated with a car purchase—even without financing—and correspondingly high, inefficient labor;
4. Despite environmental damage, our culture is as car-centric as ever;
5. Despite one out of six kids in America being reportedly “food insecure,” plenty of folks have enough wherewithal to buy a new set of wheels—the dealership was a buzz with biz.

To “unpack” (I love that in-vogue term) the foregoing observations would require far more than my daily post quota of 500 words. Thus, I’ll leave the five matters “packed.”

Instead, I’ll add—and unpack—a sixth observation: among all the browsers and buyers, I saw just one person of color—a 30-something Black woman, seated in the spacious lounge area, waiting for processing of the paperwork associated with her vehicle purchase.

Her presence prompted a thought: how must it feel to be the sole Black person amidst so many white customers? I wanted to ask her a question, which I feared she’d think was (a) dumb; (b) naive; (c) patronizing; or (d) weird as hell, being asked by a totally random geezer white guy wearing three masks, slightly askew (albeit over the nose, as well as the mouth), and a red baseball cap, which, at first blush, so to speak, could be mistaken for a MAGA cap, not one advertising the Griswold Inn of Essex, Connecticut. But in my increasingly eccentric phase of a life long-marked by non-conformity, I needed to know—had she ever heard of Taylor Branch? (See blog posts – 1/10, 1/22, 2/6 and 2/16 /2021.)

Fortunately, off-ramps in life arrive at regular intervals. Rather than indulge my curiosity, I opted more appropriately for a rewarding conversation with son Cory, on whose account I was at the dealership in the first place. We always have ample ground to cover, and he’d just completed the latest round of paperwork, thus freeing time to talk. When his next round of paperwork appeared, disrupting our father-and-son conversation, the Black woman had exited in her new car, taking my chance to ask her about Taylor Branch. Unbeknownst to Cory, he had narrowly avoided a head-on run-in with embarrassment.

Two more rounds of paperwork and we ourselves headed down the freeway—in separate cars.

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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson