The 5 Telling Signs of an Upscale Car Dealership

1. The Upscale Car Dealership's Sales Staff Look More Like Surgeons or Professors

The upscale dealership has been transformed into an antiseptic corporate environment, not unlike a Beverly Hills cosmetic surgery clinic, with Muzak, a maze of glass doors, and well manicured, impeccably dressed salespeople who, often possessing MBAs or PhDs,  are so educated and cultured that they exude a confidence that says: “I could have been a doctor, a lawyer or a university professor, but I decided to sell Lexus instead.” These dealerships are often cloying in the way they pamper the car owners who are waiting for their cars to be serviced. The lobbies offer wine, cheese, and canapés. Keeping in line with the dealership’s hauteur image, these salespeople can be spotted during their off-work hours at museums, libraries, chess matches, wine tastings, the opera, and such. They mingle with social elites at parties. They schmooze with the community’s wealthiest citizens. Clearly, they have separated themselves from the unctuous plebeian hustlers who sell cars at lesser dealerships.

2. The Upscale Car Dealership More Resembles a Celestial City Than It Does a Dealership.

The most effective car dealerships maintain the aura of a celestial city, a place where one’s salvation is born in the womb of loan approval. Hordes of prospective car buyers make their exodus to the dealership and wait like pilgrims while their sales counselor disappears into a mysterious cubicle and performs the nail-biting credit check. Akin to Judgment Day, the credit check, which entails giving up one’s social security number and a comprehensive spending history, is modern society’s definitive measure of the soul’s existential health—its reliability, its self-sufficiency, and its accountability. If the prospective car buyer falls short of these qualities, then he is sent home with his tail between his legs. To be rejected by the bank is to lose one’s honor and this shame is translated in the inability to drive upscale automobiles. On the other hand, the customer who proves worthy by having his credit approved is treated like one of the Chosen People as the dealership’s staff obsequiously groom him for his new car. They open the door for him, give him free floor mats and beam at him with a smile that says, “Congratulations, friend, you are part of the remnant chosen by God.”

3. The Upscale Car Dealership Isn't Really Selling a Car; It's Selling a Religious Icon.

Man’s love for a car is often accompanied by self-abnegation, for his personal identity disappears as he identifies with something larger than himself. This in fact is the essence of man substituting car worship for religion. He is no longer a human being since all his human characteristics have become subsumed by the assumed virtues of his favorite automobile.

4. The Salesman Doesn't Sell the Car So Much as He "Interprets" It for the Prospective Buyer.

The best sales counselor doesn’t really sell a car. He interprets the car’s “encrypted text” or “hidden message” to the customer. While this may sound overly mystical to some, it is precisely the mystical aspect of a car that appeals to a consumer, for no car is worth its money unless it's elevated to the status of a spiritual deity. The effective sales counselor knows this principle. Therefore, he does not emphasize selling the car as a literal automobile but figuratively as something higher and nobler. The car’s virtues, like music or poetry, must be “heard” or “interpreted.” Thus, all good car salesmen are what we might call Car Interpreters, for they must interpret the car’s unique language to their clients.  They must “decode” the car’s highly subtle text and reveal its “exquisite” language to the buyer. Once the Interpreter succeeds at getting his clients to “hear” the car “sing its inimitable song,” his clients break into joyful, euphoric tears. At this point, the Interpreter does not have to sell the car. The car sells itself. Car buyers drive off the Interpreter’s dealership with a renewed interest in solving the riddle of human suffering, making habitats for the homeless in third-world countries, and protecting endangered rain forest wildlife, for having the heard the car sing its joyous, euphonious song, the Car Interpreter’s clients are never quite the same again.

5. The Subject of Price is Taboo for It Sullies the Grandeur and Sacredness of the Holy Transaction.

It is taboo to negotiate or “deal down” the price of a car at an upscale dealership for several reasons. First, it is understood that the car in question is “high premium” and enjoying such high demand that it sells for full retail, if not for several thousand above list price since buying such an automobile is a privilege. Second, there is nothing so tacky at an upscale dealership as negotiating the price of the car. Those vulgar discussions are reserved for the lower-class dealerships across town. For a buyer to mention the price of a car in an upscale dealership is to betray his peasant origins and therefore to suffer great shame. Like menus in expensive restaurants that have no prices, the upscale dealerships treat car price like an afterthought. After all, the upscale car enthusiast is not interested in price; he is interested in transcendence.