The lot I work at is absolutely the last stop. If you’ve got 3 repos and just got out of prison last week and don’t have a driver’s license, we can still get you in a car.
And with typical gross of $3500-$6000 (on cars that are $7k or less) BEFORE products and ancillaries, we get paid very well, and we sell a lot of inventory. But we also attract a certain type of customer. We legit have those silent alarm buttons under our desks like bank tellers have.
So a couple of weeks ago we had a car get stolen. Our repo guys recovered it about 3 days later (they found it before the cops did). No big deal, we’re no stranger to having cars stolen. The only issue is that we didn’t recover the key. It was a 13 year old German-made car so we had to have a new fob programmed.
Last week someone tweaked out on meth came in and wanted to buy that freshly-recovered car. He paid in all cash, but was about $1,000 short after TT&L so we decided to just in-house finance that $1k at 0% interest and put a GPS in the car.
Dude pays in all $20’s and $1’s out of a woman’s purse despite no woman being around. Whatever, I’m just here to help finalize car deals not be a fucking cop or whatever. It was so god damn annoying to count out $8k in all 20’s and 1’s
Next red flag comes whenever I try to register the car.. the license he gave for a test drive is fake. Again, whatever, we’ll do car deals without a license, I just need to know who you are. He gives me this insanely bogus story and eventually I get a picture of his real ID and we finish the deal.
So, remember how the car was stolen and we didn’t recover the key? This dude calls us a day later and says that people are chasing him down with a key fob saying that they stole the car from a very specific location and he wants a discount or his money back or something. Here’s the thing, we never told him it was stolen and we never told him where it was stolen from.
(side note: we didn’t pay BMW or the locksmith to invalidate the other key that was floating around out there whenever they programmed the new one)
He says he had to pay these thieves $1400 to get this second key fob back and he wants us to reimburse the money to him. Come to find out, his buddy that was with him when he was buying the car was the same guy on our cameras at the lot when the key and car were stolen. What kind of idiot steals a car then comes back weeks later to buy that car?
GPS isn’t locating. We tell the customer he has to come down yesterday to finalize the deal or made some random excuse to trick him into coming so we can adjust the GPS. He refuses to let us in the car at first. The battery is in the trunk and the customer finally agrees to let us in after moving his burglar tools and machetes around.
We adjust the GPS and he’s on his way (after more yelling and arguing over stupid bullshit). So later yesterday evening we go to close the lot down and realize that we were missing keys to 3 of our cars. Obviously we know who did it. They were causing a scene and being a distraction so one of their friends could quickly swipe some keys from the board.
GM gets on the phone with the dude Motherfucker we have you on video stealing our fucking keys bring them the fuck back so we don’t have to call the cops. We just want your money we don’t want to act like fucking law enforcement just bring the shit back you piece of shit and pay your bill god damn man come on
The dude was just right around the corner waiting with his friends for us to close. He sends his friend down to bring the keys back bro if you really have cameras you can tell it wasn’t me i’m just bringing them back to you man.
We lock the lot up, I leave a little note on this guy’s account that I’m not giving him a 60-day repo time window after this. He should be in jail, but rather than call the cops I just gave him a 10-day grace period on his $1000 that he owes or we’ll repo the car. Having a car repo’d after dropping $8,000 in cash is much worse than jail. Also, as a 3-time felon myself, I’d always rather try to handle this without getting the cops involved. I mean, if the cops arrested him, then we definitely wouldn’t get the rest of what he owed.
We went home and ended our Monday.
Let’s see how Tuesday goes! I started my day today with my customer showing his 240+ stitches he got when he tried to steal some rims to put on the car we sold him a few months ago, but the owner of the rims came out and stabbed him. Hilarious story, we laughed and laughed until he said he was laughing so hard his stitches were hurting.
Theodore Lee is the editor of Caveman Circus. He strives for self-improvement in all areas of his life, except his candy consumption, where he remains a champion gummy worm enthusiast. When not writing about mindfulness or living in integrity, you can find him hiding giant bags of sour patch kids under the bed.