513: 129 Cars

Ira Glass

Freddie is the general manager of a car dealership these days, but he used to be a car salesman. And he was a good one, partly because he's got what he calls the gift for the gab. His go-to move in lots of situations is to finish his sentence and then laugh, even when the sentence is bad news. Like, here he is assessing his chances of making his sales goal for the month.

Ira Glass

Or this is him talking about a month when the car dealership did not make its sales goal.

Ira Glass

So when Freddie is not laughing, you know it's bad. In mid-October, Freddie did not laugh much at his weekly meetings with the guys who sell cars for him.

Ira Glass

Last month, they didn't make their sales goal. That was September. The first week of school is always bad for car sales in the suburbs. They were supposed to sell 127 cars and trucks. They sold 82. So they have to make October.

And when I say have to make, this is not some sort of abstract, feel-good, "compete with the dealership down the block just for fun" kind of competition. They're part of Chrysler. And if they sell 129 cars and trucks by the end of October, Chrysler will pay them a bonus that's pretty much the difference between the dealership being in the black or being in the red for the month, somewhere between $65,000 and $85,000, depending on which models they sell. Different cars earn different amounts. If they sell 128 cars, fall just one car short, they get nothing.

Ira Glass

In the middle of the month, the owner of this dealership, a sweet-faced guy named Marc Brodlieb, and Freddie, show me the document where Chrysler set their October sales goal.

Ira Glass

What makes this tricky is that there are four other Jeep dealerships within 10 miles of Marc and Freddie, and Marc says that most customers will shop price at two or three of them. So to stay competitive, Marc and Freddie do what pretty much everybody else does. They set lower prices, knock hundreds of dollars off the price of the cars, sometimes sell them for less than they pay Chrysler for them, with the hope that they're going to hit their sales goal and get the bonus to make up the difference.

Ira Glass

So with 12 days left to go in the month, numbers wobbly, Freddie laid it on thick during his weekly meeting with the sales team. He told them he sees them over the dealership's security cams.

Ira Glass

So everybody grabs balloons. Grown men inflate and tie and decorate. It's a truism in their business, balloons sell cars. And then nobody shows up for an hour, two hours, three hours-- four hours. Saturday should be one of their busiest days, and it's empty.

Ira Glass

Early afternoon, Freddie told one of our producers, Brian Reed, that it was way slower than usual. I don't know if you can catch this, but try to notice the song that is playing over the radio in the background as they talk.

Ira Glass

Marc, who owns this dealership, and Freddie, who runs it, both know that most people do not trust car dealers. Most people think that they're ripping us off, throwing on extra charges, milking us for every dime. And they say, if you and I only knew the reality, we would see that, in fact, the dealer is not making a killing off us. In fact, the dealer is often squeaking by with a very thin profit margin. They say it is all very different from what people think. And to prove their point, they let us watch.

A bunch of us from our radio show, we recorded them as they headed towards the end of the month, trying to make their goal, trying to sell 129 cars, which, you know, you would think that would be very straightforward, very businesslike. After all, new cars and trucks, they're 15% of all retail sales. But if what we saw was typical, what that means is that hundreds of billions of dollars in economic activity and nearly 2 million jobs exist thanks only to millions of messy seat-of-the-pants deals, many of which barely come together, as salesmen sweat out their end-of-the-month quotas. It is way more chaotic than we expected.

And we saw things, it's true, we think will surprise a lot of car buyers. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Today, one car dealership tries to sell 129 cars. We get to know the resolute men and women who try to pull that off.

Quick note, this show is a rerun. Everything you'll hear in this hour all happened in October a couple years back. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

So I wish I could pretend that we got interested in this subject at our radio show because we realized what an important part of the economy car sales are. And I wish I could pretend that we did a huge survey to find the most typical dealership out there. But in fact, we got interested in this topic and this particular dealership-- Town & Country Jeep Chrysler Dodge Ram is what it's called, in Levittown, New York, on Long Island-- when one of our coworkers here at the radio show, Robyn Semien, bought a used car there.

Here's how that happened. A friend of hers who knows all about cars told her that the only vehicle that she should even consider for her young family is the Honda Pilot. So she went looking online. She saw one listed on cars.com. It was at Town & Country.

And she called. And she had no intention at all of going to look at the car. But a salesman convinced her, oh, you know what? You should come out today, right today. Talked her into it, which meant an hour-long ride on a train from Brooklyn with her husband and her four-year-old.

And then once she got there, they upsold her to a newer, more expensive vehicle, a Jeep Liberty, which she drove off the lot 24 hours later. Robyn told me this story in the car in question on our first ride out to the dealership.

Ira Glass

You got that? These people are such good salesmen, not only did she pay more, not only did they put her into a Jeep, which meant that, since they are a Jeep dealer, they could sell her a warranty, which they also did for a few thousand dollars, she came out of this loving her car and loving them. How did they do this?

Ira Glass

Well, before we go any further, I think I should give you a quick primer on the basic setup and cast of characters at this dealership. New cars are sold at Town & Country-- and we're going to be spending most of our time with new cars today-- by seven men and one woman, who, by the way, constantly make fun of each other in this raunchy way that we cannot play you over the radio. Just know that that's happening.

Plus, there are two guys in the finance department. And then, overseeing all of them, there are the general manager, Freddie, who you already met, and then, out on the showroom floor all day, every day, are two managers who you're going to be hearing from a lot over the course of this hour. These are Mike Perez and Sal Lanzilotta.

Of the two, Sal is the more complicated figure. Balding, with a gray goatee, he's got this vibe that is halfway between Ben Kingsley in Gandhi and the laconic hitman Mike from Breaking Bad. When Sal gets up to speak at the weekly sales meetings-- the meeting, by the way, is in the middle of the showroom-- he paces around a red convertible as he talks, reminding everybody of the basic tenets of car sales.

Ira Glass

Nothing's changed in a hundred years of selling cars, he tells them at one meeting. The customer wants to pay as little as possible. We want to make as much as we can.

Ira Glass

OK. So these guys, the managers, Sal and Mike, sit near the front door of the showroom at this elevated platform that everybody calls the podium or the desk, and they oversee all the terms of all the deals.

And if you've ever bought a car, maybe you've wondered what really happens when the salesman leaves you and they go back and they talk to their manager, they talk to the boss. What do they do? Well, what they do is, we were told, they load their lips. Here's Freddie.

Ira Glass

So for instance, when one of the salesmen wants to get a woman to bring her husband in today to test drive the car that she's chosen, they huddle at the desk, a bunch of them, and Freddie starts to improv some lines for the salesman to say.

Ira Glass

He's totally making this up. There's no weekend money like this.

Ira Glass

And with that, the salesman heads off.

Ira Glass

But before the managers can load their lips, they have to figure out what price they're going to ask for and the terms of the deal and all that. And this works differently, I think, than the way that most of us imagine is happening when we buy a car. We assume that the managers and the salesmen are a unified team, and it's us versus them.

But in fact, managers and salespeople are often at odds with each other, and they spin information and they lie to each other. Here's Peter Possas, a very experienced salesman, who, at the time of this recording, was three cars shy of the 18 that he was supposed to sell in October. And what he's doing here is he's asking a couple what they want their monthly payments to be on a new car.

Ira Glass

OK, hear that? $199 a month. Then Peter marches over to talk to the managers at the desk. And listen to the number that he tells Sal that the customer wants.

Ira Glass

$150. Not $199. As soon as Sal is out of earshot, Peter turns to the reporter who's trailing him, Sean Cole.

Ira Glass

Why do this? Well, later, when the negotiations get tough, the manager, Sal, may ask Peter to squeeze the customers for a lower number on their trade-in, or maybe a higher price for the car, something that might be hard to talk the customer into. But Peter now has wiggle room. He knows he can push the couple up to $199 a month in payments because they already said yes to it. He can make up the difference there.

In fact, as the deal proceeds, it runs into a problem. The desk, the couple, and the salesman cannot come to an agreement about how much the dealership should pay the couple for their trade-in. Sal says it is worth one price. The customers say that another Jeep dealer offered them a lot more than that for the trade-in. But of course, that may be a lie. There's a saying in the business-- buyers are liars. Or maybe the other dealership is lying to the customers. Maybe the other dealership told them an unrealistically high price that they never intend to pay. That happens, too. Everyone is playing everyone.

Sal, at the desk, tells Peter, the salesman, that the customer cannot be getting that trade-in price from the competitor. It can't be true.

Ira Glass

So to summarize, the managers and the salespeople are playing each other. The customer is playing them both. Each dealership is playing the other dealerships. And the manufacturer is playing all the dealerships, with its quotas and its incentives. Chrysler sold 140,083 cars and trucks in October. This is what it took to sell one of them.

Ira Glass

Like I said earlier, several of us came and recorded at this dealership and each of us chose different salespeople to follow. Robyn Semien chose Bobby Tantillo. A warning to listeners, somebody uses a word in an offensive way in her story. We're going to leave that in because we're trying to document what really happened.

Robyn Semien

Robert Tantillo-- Bobby T around the dealership-- is in last place. He doesn't like talking about it.

Robyn Semien

I didn't have to ask them. Freddie makes it clear in that weekly speech he gives every Saturday. Remember that meeting? He goes over everyone's individual sales, gives them new goals. Bob's there that morning, too. Freddie is keeping track.

Robyn Semien

Bob doesn't flinch. He sits poker-faced in a chair. A couple of guys look down or stare at their hands.

Robyn Semien

Bobby T's new here. Before this, he was in the wholesale food business for three decades, became a car salesman a few years ago after he retired. Bob says last month, he had the most sales for a couple weeks. But last month was last month. Freddie needs this month.

Bob says the issue is, there's just so much about selling cars that's out of his control. He says his biggest problem this month is a lack of leads. One way salesmen get leads is from the internet. Town & Country lists all the cars it has online.

When people see one they like, they usually call before they come in to make sure the car is really there. But those calls go to guys in the back, in the internet department. Then when the customers show up at the store, they meet whoever they talk to on the phone, and one of the bosses at the desk hands them over to a real salesperson, like Bob. Except that Bob says he's never been handed one of those leads.

Robyn Semien

Bob's not tight with the desk. But Freddie, in an attempt to help out, gives Bob exactly what he wants-- his first internet lead. He tells Bob, go on back, get Dan. Dan works in the internet office, so these words-- "go get Dan"-- that's the signal for taking over an internet lead.

Freddie raises his eyebrows at Bob and nods his head slowly like, you got that? Bob misunderstands the cue. He gets Dan from the internet office, who comes up to the desk to greet the customers and hand them off to Bob, who has suddenly disappeared. No one knows where he went, so Freddie gives the customers to another salesman. A bewildered Freddie calls over to Dan.

Robyn Semien

Bob walks up minutes later.

Robyn Semien

It's hard to watch someone with a lot of experience berate someone with much less experience for not knowing better. There's a line from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. "You never open your mouth till you know what the shot is." When you don't know the shot, it's not like you don't want to know the shot. Bob doesn't know the shot. But he's trying.

Ira Glass

So there actually is a place at Town & Country where they keep score of who has sold what. It's in Freddie's office, the general manager's office. It's a whiteboard with each person's sales for the month to date on it. Every car or truck that they've sold is represented by a little magnetic rectangle that's roughly the size of a 9-volt battery. Everybody calls these chips. And the different colors of the chips stand for different models of cars and trucks.

And throughout the day, salesmen come and they hover around the whiteboard, seeing where everybody stands. And generally, everybody is shooting for at least 15 sales a month. At 15 sales, your commission for the next month jumps from 20% to 30%.

There's also a bonus of $600 when you hit 10 cars, $250 if you sell seven cars in the first two weeks of the month. There's money you get directly from Chrysler, and that could be anywhere between $50 and $250 per car. Mid-level salesmen here and Town & Country make around $60,000 a year. Top performers are closer to $100,000. Most of that is commissions and bonuses.

The number one salesman at Town & Country is always the same. Some months, he has twice as many sales as whoever's in second place.

Ira Glass

That's salesman Peter Possas standing at the board. It's the middle of the month.

Ira Glass

All the veteran sales guys at Town & Country say these things about this guy. He also happens to be the youngest salesman of dealership. He's 28. Jason Mascia. Reporter Sean Cole followed him around.

Sean Cole

He showed me this internal Chrysler company website that ranks all the salespeople.

Sean Cole

108 out of 29,000.

Sean Cole

Jason's barely been in this business for four years. When I met him in the last weekend of October, he had already outsold everybody for the month, including a guy who's been doing this since Jason was a toddler. But he says he's not competing with the others. He's competing with himself.

Sean Cole

As we're sitting there talking, he pulls out a piece of paper and starts writing down everything he's saying as he says it. He always does this. I have 10 pages of notes from this interview-- his notes.

So most of the salespeople at Town & Country are shooting for 15 to 20 sales in a month. That's considered a solid performance. And Jason is not satisfied with a solid performance.

Sean Cole

He writes down that number and circles it and then moves on.

Sean Cole

Writes down 30, underlined "several." That is, 30 cars a month.

Sean Cole

Writes down 30, plus sign.

Sean Cole

For October, hoping to finish the month in the mid-30s somewhere. But Jason's own personal Olympic goal?

Sean Cole

What took me a while to understand is how Jason sells so many cars, or what he's doing differently than everybody else. And we asked pretty much everybody else this question, but their answers were kind of generic. He's a good-looking kid, good personality, got the gift of the gab. Even Jason sort of defaults to truisms when you ask him what his secret is. Says he treats every customer like he would want to be treated.

But as much as you can figure out anybody in less than a week, I think Jason's success is due to three basic attributes, three characteristics he has that have propelled him to the top. So I'll go through those now.

Number one, constructive delusion. Now, Jason knows that a certain percentage of customers, depending on the month, will walk away from him without buying a car. Of course that happens. And yet, paradoxically, he enters every negotiation full in the knowledge that it will not happen. As we're sitting there, he drew a picture of a very lopsided hourglass with a line across the skinny part.

Sean Cole

To Jason, the glass is not half empty, and it is not half full.

Sean Cole

It is 100% full.

Sean Cole

But for someone who barely possesses the word pessimistic in his vocabulary, that's not always how he seems on the sales floor. More than any of the other sellers, Jason's anxious.

Sean Cole

Biting his nails, hovering around the manager's desk. It's like the dealership making its quota is personal to him.

Jason-- and this is number two on our list of attributes. Jason doesn't just want to sell cars. Jason needs to sell cars. Case in point, I watched him work this one deal, a lease on a Jeep Liberty. He played it totally cool at first. But when the haggling started, it was like someone had clamped a set of jumper cables to his ankle.

Sean Cole

The guy insists for an hour that he can't leave a deposit without talking to his wife. And then he leaves a deposit. Jason wins.

Sean Cole

He runs outside to chat with another customer that he's already closed.

Sean Cole

And at this point, he's completely dosed up on adrenaline, jabbering like a speed freak.

Sean Cole

Two hours later, he's already crashed. It's like that deal never happened.

Sean Cole

So that's two. And then the third and final attribute that I think has led Jason to being the top seller of Town & Country, ABC. Always Be Calling your girlfriend to say, baby, I just have a couple more things to take care of and then I'll be home.

Sean Cole

This is Jason's girlfriend, Gena. She stopped by to say hi to him at the shop one of the days we were there. The night before that, he had come home too late and screwed up their dinner plans. Gena says they're always running into a store five minutes before it closes. She's imposed a no-work-talk-over-dinner rule, but Jason always has just one last thing to tell her about something that happened at work.

And they've only been together a year, so they can both still laugh about it, at least with me. But of course, working long hours can threaten everything else in your life, and the entire business of selling cars is built on working long hours, working weekends, when more customers come in, coming in on your day off, when the store needs to meet its quota. And the damage that can do is all around Jason.

The sales guy in the cubicle next to him, Peter Possas, told me managing a sales team at a dealership in Florida is what led to his divorce.

Sean Cole

Manny, who sits next to Peter, is separated from his wife partly due to the business. Theresa in finance said her job caused her divorce. Sal, one of the managers you heard from before, says the job was a factor in both of his divorces.

Still, Jason and Gena wouldn't even be together if it weren't for the job. They met at the dealership when she was buying from another salesperson. And now here they are, both driving the exact same kind of car.

Ira Glass

In the second half of October at Town & Country, sales stay slow. And going into the last two days of the month, they still have so many cars to sell that when Freddie sees me arrive in the morning on the next to last day of the month, knowing what it is that I'm about to ask him, he starts laughing.

Ira Glass

Here's how hard that number is. Freddie tells me that he only expects 15 or 16 customers to show up in the store each day, which means that to get to his number, he's going to have to sell a car to every other person who walks in the door.

And what my fellow radio producers and I witness over the next two days-- OK, some deals do go through, but it's almost a catalog of all the ways that a car deal can fall apart. There were the obvious ways. A young woman doesn't get approved for her car loan. A father and son promise to come back tomorrow to sign the papers and take the car. They never come back.

But there turn out to be all sorts of other ways that a car deal can implode that we had never imagined or conceived. For instance, Bob T.

Ira Glass

You remember Bob T, the salesman with the lowest sales of anybody this month. A deal of his starts to unravel after the paperwork is signed, after the deposit is paid.

Basically, what happens is he told a couple that their new car is $2,000 cheaper than it actually is. They found out the truth while talking to Rich, the finance manager, and kind of hit the roof.

Ira Glass

Bob T was also surprised. He himself thought it was $2,000 cheaper. The finance manager, Rich, tells Bob T that Bob T should have, first, better understood which rebates the couple's qualified for. That's where the mistake was. And second, he should have explained it to the couple.

Ira Glass

Rich manages to save this deal, but barely.

Then around 7:00 at night on the next-to-last day of the month, one of the salesmen, Scott Froehlich, gets some weird news about one of his sales. He tells one of our producers, Jonathan Menjivar, that some customers that he had just sold a car to were now coming back to the dealership, but not to pick up their new car and take it home. No, no, no.

Ira Glass

That's right. They accidentally sold the same car twice to two different customers.

Here's how it happened. Scott had sold a red Jeep Grand Cherokee to this customer, this guy who came in with his dad. They left a deposit. But another salesman, Mike Lester-- everybody calls him Mike L-- had already sold that same car the day before. The customer hadn't picked up the car yet. And the little magnetic chip that they use to keep track of the sales, the one for this car, nobody had put it on the whiteboard in Freddie's office, the board that keeps track of who sold what. Scott is not happy.

Ira Glass

Or maybe this does a better job capturing his mood.

Ira Glass

An hour later, the customer is back on the lot with his dad, and Scott walks up to him. And maybe this is the time to tell you that Scott moonlights as a mortician, which means he's used to handling all kinds of situations with customers. And so even though he did absolutely nothing wrong, here's what he says.

Ira Glass

Hope you got the customer's Godfather reference there.

Scott tells him that if the other sale falls through, the car is his. But the other deal does not fall through, so Scott and the guy go wandering around the lot in the dark, looking for another Grand Cherokee-- red. The guy is set on red. And they find one.

Ira Glass

Yes, it is another red Grand Cherokee. Scott writes down the stock number, runs to the desk to check it out, and it has also been sold. Scott's only hope is that that deal will fall apart and he can sell the car to this customer, who he sends home. Fingers crossed.

The night, however, is still not over. Then around quarter to 8:00 that night, something happens at the desk that really, really ticks off the manager, Sal.

Ira Glass

OK, here's the short version. Stephen Brown, a computer engineer from New Jersey, has come in to finalize a deal on a new Dodge Challenger coupe. Sal greets him.

Ira Glass

Stephen is Lori's customer, the one woman on the sales team. But Lori is out sick. Stephen tells Sal that she texted him that somebody else was going to be taking care of the deal.

Ira Glass

Stephen sits down. Sal gets Lori on the phone.

Ira Glass

Sal pages Scotty, but he's not around. Peter's around, but he's working another deal. Then, you know how in every shop of every kind everywhere there is that one team-playing, late-staying, extra go-gettery kid you can turn to who will always help clean up whatever weirdo mess just erupted one hour before closing? Yeah. In this case, that would happen to be--

Ira Glass

Jason comes over to the podium. Sean Cole, who is trailing Jason, picks up the story from here.

Sean Cole

So Jason comes over to the desk, and Sal explains what's going on.

Sean Cole

Now, this isn't a situation where Stephen just needs to sign some papers and pick up the keys to his new car. There are still a lot of steps to march through.

Sean Cole

He finds the folder and learns that Stephen and Lori never got to a final final offer for his trade-in. In order to do that, the car has to go up on the lift for a full inspection in the service department, which is inexplicably closed on this, the second-to-last day of the month, when they need absolutely every sale they can get.

Sean Cole

With no inspection, there's no trade-in. And with no trade-in, there's no deal. Somebody finally does a cursory inspection on the car, without the lift, in the dark.

All the while, Stephen is getting more and more anxious that no one seems to know what's going on. Jason tries to get him in with the finance guy to work out the terms of the deal, but the finance guy's busy. Jason explains this to Sal, which sets Sal off again.

Sean Cole

This is actually the third time Stephen's made the trek out here from New Jersey. It's a two-hour drive he does not want to make again.

Sean Cole

They cannot lose this deal. They're still 10 cars short of their monthly goal. When Stephen does sit down with the finance manager, he can't get the interest rate he wanted, 3.3%. They finally resolve that, but then he doesn't have insurance for the new vehicle, or he hasn't called Geico to transfer the policy from his old car, and he takes care of that, too.

But then, as he's transferring his stuff from the trunk of his old car into the new one, the billing office notices a glitch. Something's wrong with the new insurance card from Geico. Stephen's address isn't on it. And the date on it says October 31, even though it's October 30. That means Stephen won't be able to legally drive the car until the following day.

Sean Cole

Jason gets on the phone with Geico, thinking maybe it'll be an easy fix. It won't be. We all stand around and watch him work this thing.

Sean Cole

It's quarter past 10:00 at this point.

Sean Cole

Then it's 10:26.

Sean Cole

Finally, Tiffany comes through.

Sean Cole

Geico says it'll email a new insurance card. Jason keeps Tiffany, the operator, on the line until everything is squared away with the billing office.

Sean Cole

Billing gives the all clear. We all follow Stephen out to the parking lot. It's about 11 o'clock at this point. Jason giddily watches him tear out of the parking lot and hang a right.

Ira Glass

Well, coming up, car talk continues. That feels really weird to say. But it's true. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program is a rerun. We did all the reporting for today's show a few years ago during a month, October 2013, when car sales were strong, up over 10% what they were a year before around the country. That's 1.2 million new vehicles sold that month. But that doesn't mean that every dealership in every town had an easy time of it.

And today on our program, we watch one dealership, just one, on Long Island-- Town & Country Jeep Chrysler Dodge Ram is what it's called-- as they try to make their sales goal of 129 cars for the month. If they sell 129 cars, Chrysler is going to pay them a big bonus, and they need that money to be in the black for the month. If they just sell 128, bupkis.

Ira Glass

That's Freddie, the general manager here.

Ira Glass

On a good month, he would start the last day with just two or three cars to sell. Nine. That's crazy. And it's Halloween, which means that lots of potential customers are going to be out with their kids today.

Everybody is so tense that it's not even 10:00 in the morning and a customer walks out without buying a car.

Ira Glass

And one of the managers, Sal, has this edgy little conversation with the salesman who let him walk out.

Ira Glass

He doesn't go.

Ira Glass

The morning's still young when I find Freddie in his office selling a car to himself-- a loaner car for the maintenance department to lend out to customers who are getting their cars repaired. He's allowed to count that in his sales total.

Ira Glass

By mid-afternoon, he'll buy a second loaner car for the dealership. Back in February, Freddie bought a Durango for his wife to make the number that month, replacing a car that he had just bought a year before for her for the same reason.

Ira Glass

Freddie is calling Joe Monti, one of the guys who runs the used car side of the business at Town & Country. Joe has got his own goal to hit for the month that is separate from the new car goal. 70 used cars. That's the number Freddie set for him.

Ira Glass

While we were at Town & Country, we asked everybody what it would mean for him or her personally if the team did not make its sales goal. And it was actually this guy, Joe Monti, over in used cars, who gave us the best picture of that. Sarah Koenig hung out with him for a while.

Sarah Koenig

Joe's particularly stressed out this month. Half the time I'm with him, it feels like he's fighting, even with customers.

Sarah Koenig

Next fight, he calls a woman in the back office who he thinks ratted to Freddie about a deal she didn't like.

Sarah Koenig

I'm sort of surprised anyone would have the balls to fight with Joe. He's a big man-- 350 pounds. Large and in charge. The day I meet him, he's wearing a gray tracksuit,

but what I quickly find out is that he's wearing a tracksuit because it's his day off. He's supposed to be at his son Mike's football game against Malvern. He hasn't been able to catch an away game all season, and he took this one Sunday off to do it. It was important to him.

For so many years, he wasn't around enough for his kids. He's working all the time. Joe knows Mike will be looking for him in the stands right about now. And he's not going to be there because he's here at the car lot.

Sarah Koenig

Yesterday, Joe was late to his mother-in-law's surprise 70th birthday party. And last week, he was late for his own mother's 60th. The used car side of Town & Country is supposed to sell 70 cars by the end of the month. That's Joe's version of the 129 on the new side.

When I first met Joe, used was at 35. At stake is Joe's big year-end bonus. Joe wouldn't tell me the amount of the bonus, but he made it clear it's very, very nice. Down-payment-on-a-house nice.

Since he fell so behind the last couple months, this month, October, is make or break for Joe. He's got to get to at least 70 cars if he wants any hope of reaching that bonus by the end of the year. And it's not looking good. 20 years in the business, Joe's never seen a stretch this slow for this long.

Joe blames it mostly on Hurricane Sandy. A year ago, tens of thousands of people lost their cars all at once. And they got new ones all at once. So now, a year later, tens of thousands of people are out of the used car market who normally would be buying and selling right now.

Sarah Koenig

Joe goes outside to do an appraisal on a Nissan Quest. This also gives him a chance to have a cigarette, one of about 40 Parliaments he'll smoke today. His wife and kids get on him about the smoking. He's got six kids. Six kids-- two are grown, four of them still at home.

Joe's the only breadwinner in the family-- always has been-- so it's all on him. Even in the best of times, Joe's a worrier, like his grandmother. He's 42 years old, but he looks older. In the past year, he's gained about 80 pounds.

In the parking lot, Joe throws away a half-smoked cigarette and then looks over the Nissan Quest. Tires are so-so. Needs some detailing. It's got a cracked taillight and a bad CARFAX report, meaning it's been in an accident. $2,000 is fair for this car, Joe says. It's what these are going for at auction.

He tells me the customers are going to want at least $2,500, but there's no way he can do that. $2,500 is just too much. He heads back inside.

Sarah Koenig

Instantly caves.

Sarah Koenig

He needs the deal. They shake on it.

Joe was about 22 when he started in the car business. He had a baby at 18-- his son, Joseph-- and then four more kids-- Dean, Chris, Michael, and Adriana, plus his stepson, Louis.

Joe himself was one of five kids. His mom raised them by herself, no dad around, no money. He moved around a lot. With his own kids, he's the uptight parent, the one who doesn't laugh enough, the one who hammers them about consequences. He wants his kids to fear his wrath but also to know he loves them. Sometimes, it's tricky for him to balance that or even to talk about it.

Sarah Koenig

Joe wants his kids to have more stability than he had growing up and a better standard of living. For 16 years, they all lived in a big house in Smithtown in a fairly wealthy neighborhood. And Joe says there was pressure there. Some other kids at school had fancy clothes and extravagant vacations, blow-out sweet 16 parties. He didn't want his kids to feel less-than, so he made sure, within reason, that they had what the other kids had.

But three years ago, he left Town & Country for another job at a Toyota dealer, and it didn't go well at all. He lost-- well, he says he lost everything. But in any case, it was a lot of money. They sold their big house in Smithtown and moved to a smaller house in Levittown, about five minutes from the dealership. And in a lot of ways, Joe's glad about that. It's made them closer as a family, he says.

But he's also trying to work his way back up. He'd like to be able to buy them all a bigger house, give everyone a little more room. That's why he's so worried about this bad stretch of business and about getting that bonus.

Toward the end of the day, his son Mike calls. Joe's already spoken to the coach about how the football game went.

Ira Glass

It's mid-afternoon on the new car side of Town & Country. So what do you do all day on the last day of the month when you need to sell everything you possibly can? Well, instead of waiting for customers to come into the store, you call up any lead you have and try to close deals right over the phone if you can.

One of the salespeople, Lori, does this with a previous customer. Jason also sells to a guy he knows over the phone. Peter gets a lead from a cop upstate that he sold a Durango truck to. The lead is a friend of the cop's, also a cop, who wants the same deal his friend got. Peter gets him on the phone and says he'll give him the deal for two reasons.

Ira Glass

Of course, this leaves out the third and main reason for the great deal that he's getting-- they need eight more sales by 9 o'clock. And the cop ends up buying his Durango for $2,214 less than the dealership paid for it. Even after finance charges and holdback and all the other ways they make money, they still lost on this one.

Ditto this guy, Richard Massana. He was going to get an oil change this morning and stepped in on a whim and they showed him numbers way lower than any other dealer that he'd been to. Richard called up his wife to let her know, hey, surprise, we're getting a new truck. On his test drive, he still seemed amazed at what was happening.

Ira Glass

His payment will be $425 a month. The salesman says later that it should have been $525, but it's the end of the month. Turns out, yes, it is true that you do get a better deal at the end of the month at Town & Country-- at least any month that they're struggling to make their goal.

When you actually look at the numbers, the cars that they sell on the last two days, the average deal actually loses money versus the deals that they make at the beginning of the month, where they made about $900 per car. OK, for car people, I'm now going to say these words. I am factoring in everything they made on financing and warranties and extras and holdback and the 1% they get from Chrysler on every car when I make that statement.

I am not factoring in any money that they would get if they hit their number and get their bonus from Chrysler. That would add about $500 per car, which still does not give them a huge profit per car. It used to be a lot higher. But today, because people research prices on the internet, profit margins on new cars are lower than what they used to be, not just here at this dealership, but everywhere in the car business.

The owner of Town & Country told me that he used to make $500 more per car, and each salesman made more per car. Now they all have to make it up in volume. So it's more of a grind, a harder job with tighter deals and less reward.

And if you're wondering, car dealerships make less profit than other businesses. A recent study by an outfit called Sageworks found that car dealers end up with less than $0.03 on every dollar they make as profit, which is less profit than furniture stores, office supply stores, restaurants. Lower than pretty much everything but grocery stores. When car dealers say that they are not making a killing, on average, it's true.

At some point during this last day of the month, one of the deals that they had been counting on falls through. Mike Lester's sale of a red Grand Cherokee. But turns out that's no problem for the dealership because Scott has a customer who wants that exact same truck. You remember that deal the day before, where two salesmen sold the same car to two different customers. The mortician? It's that salesman and that customer, and the salesman, Scott, is very, very happy. And the only bad news about all of this is what it does to Mike Lester's sales total for the month.

Ira Glass

14 sucks because, like I said earlier, 15 is the magic number. 15 is where the serious bonuses and commissions kick in. Most of the guys count on getting those.

Ira Glass

But then, Scott, whose customer is now going to get the red Grand Cherokee, Scott realizes what this means for Mike and says to Mike--

Ira Glass

Now Mike will get the credit for the sale. He's at 15 again.

Ira Glass

Scott kisses Mike on the cheek. Producer Brian Reed witnesses all this.

Ira Glass

So amidst anxious salesmen and salesmen literally running to the desk or to finance, there is one salesman who is a model of calm. Even his cubicle is different from everybody else's. There's no swag. There's no pictures of family. There are no good luck charms. It's bare. The salesman, his name is Manny Rosales, says he doesn't like the distractions. One of our producers, Brian, who you just heard, got to know him.

Brian Reed

Manny is 58, born in Peru. He has gray hair and glasses. One morning at the showroom, he gestured cryptically for me to come over to his desk, as if he had a secret to tell me. Turn that off, he said, pointing to my tape recorder.

I explained that I was a radio reporter and I needed to record whatever he was going to tell me for it to be useful, but he wasn't having it. He seemed unimpressed by our little radio story. He said my colleagues and I were like fishermen who had no idea what we were angling for. We had no focus. We were just casting blindly.

Manny, I soon learned, is a man of many metaphors. I put down my recorder. The thing you need to be paying attention to, he said, is the negotiation. The salesman is the tiger, and the customer is the deer.

The tiger has to eat, and you can't eat if you don't kill that deer. He moved his right hand up and then clamped his fingers around his own neck. You have to go for the neck, he said. But if you try to kill him too early, the deer will wake up and run away.

As the day went on, I kept trying to get Manny to let me record him, but he wouldn't. Instead, he'd come up to me while I was interviewing someone else, point to his head very deliberately, presumably to his brain, give me a knowing look, and then walk away. At one point, we found ourselves facing each other at his desk. He asked me if I had read the greatest book ever written about car sales. I don't think so, I told him. What is it? The Art of War, he said, by Sun Tzu.

Sun Tzu, as you maybe know, was a military general and strategist in ancient China. The Art of War is his magnum opus, where he lays out his tactics for how to succeed in conflict. And though Sun Tzu was writing about actual war, the book has become well known in business and sales circles. It's kind of like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, if that had been written in the fifth century BC on individual strips of bamboo.

So I went to the bookstore and bought a copy and then headed back to Town & Country.

Brian Reed

I handed him my copy of The Art of War, which I'd marked up with notes about its relevance to car sales. I could see why Manny felt that it spoke to his profession. Lines like, "draw them in with the prospect of gain," "take them by confusion" seemed especially on point.

And I was in. For two days, Manny took me under his wing with my recorder running and became my sales sensei.

Manny's kind of an unusual car salesman because he has no affection for cars at all. If a customer asks him how much horsepower a car has or how quickly it can go from 0 to 60, usually he has to look up the answer or go ask a coworker. He has no interest in that stuff. So instead, Manny developed a way to sell the customer using a different approach.

Brian Reed

To help me understand this-- how to penetrate the brain of one's opponent-- Manny showed me a couple of movies on YouTube. One was a re-enactment of the Second Punic War in the third century BC, Hannibal's campaign against the Romans. Manny wanted me to pay attention to one battle in particular from that war, the Battle of Cannae.

Brian Reed

At Cannae, Hannibal's troops were vastly outnumbered. He had about 40,000 men versus Rome's army, which had roughly 85,000.

Brian Reed

The details of Hannibal's strategy are a bit complicated to go into here. Manny had to draw me a diagram to help me get it. But let's just say it involves an unusual troop formation that made the Romans think they were gaining ground when really they were at Hannibal's whim.

Brian Reed

We're watching this, remember, on a laptop on the showroom floor. Customers are milling about, checking out the new cars, as Hannibal's mercenaries and cavalry encircle the Romans and trap them for good.

[BATTLE SOUNDS]

Brian Reed

So how does Manny use this to sell Dodge Chargers? Well, just like Hannibal would, he presents the customer with the unexpected.

What they expect is for the salesman to be pushy and try to coerce them into buying a car at a certain price. So Manny does the opposite. He acts as if he doesn't even want to sell the car. He agrees with the customer, uses a similar tone, repeats words the customer says. If someone comes in and says he's just there to browse, not to buy, that's totally fine, Manny will say, and he'll back off.

Brian Reed

Manny gave me an example of this that he'd executed a few days earlier with a customer named Julio, who was looking for a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Julio runs warehouses for a living and negotiates for his company, so Manny knew he'd be a formidable opponent. Julio told me later that he'd already visited seven other Jeep dealerships by the time he got to Town & Country and was calling and texting with another three.

When he sat down across from Manny, Julio made the first offer, $36,000. The Jeep was listed at $45,000, so Julio's offer was absurdly low. Julio knew it was unrealistic. He expected Manny to say no way, that he could never give it to him for that price.

But then listen to what Manny did instead.

Brian Reed

Where's the credit card. Manny says this was the key move, the unexpected move.

Brian Reed

After days of negotiation, Manny ended up scoring this deal. Julio paid $40,000 for the Jeep, which was low. The dealership lost money on the car. But after it was all over, Julio told me that this move, when Manny pretended to take his low offer seriously, he said, without that, he would have walked out of Town & Country immediately, which would have meant no sale, nothing towards the monthly quota.

Ira Glass

By 4:00 PM, the hustling in the showroom is paying off. Chips are going up on the board in Freddie's office. Even one of the guys in the back rooms is pitching in-- a finance guy, Terrance Kelly, TK. He's reaching for the phone.

Ira Glass

TK's got 34 nieces and nephews. Katie is his goddaughter, though, so he keeps a special eye out for her. At the time that this was recorded, the rest of the family didn't know that she was pregnant, though he did. Even though he did not know, until he picked up the receiver and started filling out the forms for the car sale, her fiance's last name.

Ira Glass

The dealership is selling the car to Katie below cost at a $900 loss. And TK is going to end up spending $1,200 of his own money to ship the car out to her in Las Vegas. And this? This is the sale that puts him over the top. This is the 129th sale of the month.

Just a few minutes before 5 o'clock, right after this happens, I stop by Freddie the general manager's office. Nobody is running into high fives. There's not even a staff announcement on the PA saying they made it.

Ira Glass

He texts her back. This fight actually continues for the next few hours over text message. Then, at 6:57, two hours before closing, one of the managers, Mike Perez, and Jason start huddling the desk, a little freaked out.

Mike walks to Freddie's office to explain the problem to Freddie. Their count is wrong. They're not at 129 because there's an extra chip on the board.

Ira Glass

Freddie does know that, at this moment, there is another deal being negotiated that could possibly get them back up to 129. Peter is the salesman for that one. But the deal is stuck over the price of the customer's trade-in, what they should pay for it.

Ira Glass

But that deal is not too easy to settle. And while they're waiting, more bad news. You remember that red Grand Cherokee that Scott and Mike Lester each had sold to different people and then Mike Lester's guy dropped out and Scott got the deal, and there was the kiss? Now Scott's guy also drops out. He doesn't want to buy tonight because he wants his mom to see the car tomorrow.

Freddie overhears Scott saying this to one of the managers.

Ira Glass

Scott's deal is dead. They're at 127 with just two hours left before closing.

Ira Glass

So now they scramble to figure out, OK, there was Mike Lester's customer for that red Grand Cherokee. Could they possibly give him better terms that would bring him back to the table? Freddie orders one of the managers, Mike Perez, to make that happen.

Ira Glass

Yeah. The only question is, how much does the deal lose, not whether it loses. So Mike Perez calls Richie in finance. Richie tells him he's in luck. The guy actually called back saying that he would agree to the terms but-- OK, here's the catch-- he just wants 24 hours to think about this. Mike Perez asks, OK, if we sweeten the terms, can we get him to decide right now? Rich doesn't think so.

Ira Glass

All is lost.

And then, in just six minutes, they turn it around. Rich offers a better deal to that guy on the red Grand Cherokee after all and yes, he takes it. And Peter's deal that was stuck over the price of the trade-in gets unstuck when the managers suck it up and pay $1,500 more for the trade-in than they think it's worth. Back to 129.

Everybody seems a little stunned by what just happened when it's done. Freddie and Sal look out at the showroom from the desk like old sailors on the deck of a 19th century ship that just got thrashed around by a hurricane and also a murderous white whale.

Ira Glass

Freddie's phone, of course, doesn't stop with the text messages through all this.

Ira Glass

They get their bonus from Chrysler, $68,000. And because of it, the dealership ends up in the black, not the red, for the month. Jason finishes the month at 29 cars, almost twice anyone else, as usual. Manny has 10; Mike L, 15; Scott, 18.

The used car side, Joe Monti's side, did not meet its goal. They were hoping for 70. They got 57, meaning Joe Monti probably will not be getting his year-end bonus this year.

And Bob T, the salesman at the bottom of the board with the least sales this month, well, the night isn't over for Bob T.

Ira Glass

Not long after they reached 129, a couple walks in wanting to buy a Dodge Dart for their 19-year-old son. Bob T rushes them through the test drive, has the husband sit at his computer and use his phone to quickly call the insurance company and then runs-- literally runs-- to get their new car prepped and inspected in the garage.

Ira Glass

And with that, Bob T lands Town & Country's last sale of the month, number 130, one car past the goal of 129. Or anyway, that's what they thought that night. The next morning, when everybody comes in, they look at Chrysler's official count on the computer. And according to Chrysler, no, their count was wrong. One of their sales should not have been counted in October, which means that they did not have 130 cars like they thought. They had only 129, exactly 129. Which means, yes, it was Bob T and his very last sale of the month that took them across the finish line. Bob T saved the day.

Special thanks to Marc Brodlieb and the entire staff at Town & Country Jeep Chrysler Dodge Ram in Levittown for letting us hang out for days and barely ever suggesting during that time that one of us might help them reach their goal for the month by buying a new Grand Cherokee. We sent a photographer who does celebrity photographs-- his name is Jeff Minton-- out to Levittown to photograph the sales staff at Town & Country. You can see the results at our website, thisamericanlife.org.

Today's program was produced by Robyn Semien and myself with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Brian Reed, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for this episode was Julie Snyder. Production help from BA Parker and Diane Wu. Matt Tierney is our technical director.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. On a vacation this month in Rome, he stood in line for three hours-- three hours-- at the Colosseum then gave up, went back to his hotel.

Ira Glass

Don't worry. He'll be back. I'm Ira Glass. We will also be back next week with more stories of This American Life.