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You can do this at any dealership.

Dealerships try to hire smart helpful people that can sell 30+ cars a month like I did. They don't always succeed, just like most companies can't hire the best programmers consistently either.

People have been saying this since dealerships stared buying internet leads. I started in 2008. Even then internet departments were fully built out and everyone was worried about the end of salespeople for several years. So yes, even back in 1999 you could email a dealership and work multiple salespeople against each other. And that made people talk about the end of salespeople, negotiated prices, and dealerships.

Even Tesla has a lot of salespeople, at corporate and at the showcase stores. You just can't get a discount from them.

If someone built a car vending machine, it would only be a matter of time until someone noticed you can make sales go up at the vending machine by putting someone standing next to it.

I think any work that puts you in direct personal contact with thousands of people is going to be valuable.

I sometimes used to think how fun being a waiter could be compared to car sales, because the interaction in nowhere near as tense and adversarial. In the best of sales, you quickly become and stay friendly with people, but the bottom 25% are mini wars and that beats on you after a while.

People have been saying this for 20 years. Yet car salespeople are more important than ever from what I've seen. But let's ignore that because you could argue it's just opinion.

My favorite example/rebuttal to this is: Imagine a car sales evolves to basically vending machines. You walk up to the box, pick a car, swipe your card, and a roll-up door opens and your car pops out. Amazing! No salespeople needed. Every town just gets a few vending machine!

Then one day, one vending machine owner decides to pay a bright kid to stand next to the vending machine in case the people have questions. Sales would go up at that vending machine. Soon all vending machines have a salesperson standing next to them helping people. And we're back to where we started.

(Unless you think a smart helpful person standing next to the vending machine would make sales go down I suppose... But this is against everything I've seen selling thousands of cars)

If you buy a Toyota following the Tesla model, where you call and say "I'd like to buy the car you have, for the price you have listed", you will also have a generally good experience.

I agree, the "finance person" that technically does your paperwork and pitches you all those aftermarket products is the biggest crook in the industry (right next to the service advisors that tell you what service your car needs and the price).

I would sometimes fill in for finance on a rainy day, and even though I was top 0.3% in the country when it came to car sales, I Couldn't sell that garbage even with a gun pointed at me. I just can't lie like that.

I was about top 1% in the country. So buying from me would be a different experience. Maybe you landed on someone in the bottom 50%, at a bad dealership too.

The owner of our dealership was a Cal grad, the sales manager was a Jewish accounting major, I had an engineering degree, my favorite coworker completed medschool but couldn't pass the MCATS, and everyone else had a degree too.

When I went to work for a Penske dealership (a public company), corporate was in town one day and had a meeting with me to ask how the owner at my previous dealership did things. So maybe it wasn't your typical car dealership.

I would get many of these type leads. The better you are, the more of these you can close. They're not anyone's favorite, but if I have a car we can't sell because it's an ugly color, or weird options configuration, or in general we need to move some cars, I'd play along. I'm just kidding a bit.

In reality, even very desirable cars can have this game played on them. I once sold a car $25k over MSRP, and the customer was thrilled because that was the lowest markup he could find.

When it comes to used cars, finding the lowest price is usually a terrible plan I could go into for longer than a PG blog post.

I went to a top US university in a stem degree. My coworker was a med student that couldn't pass the Mcats, but wasn't a bozo. Basically everyone had a degree, and everyone made atleast $100k. I personally made about $225k but as I said, I was pretty good. I know a person in Bay area car sales making $300k+. I assume there are many others.

I assume you agree a McDonald's employee is not going to close accountants and doctors and lawyers and programmers on a car as often as an engineering grad would... And if that's true, why would a car dealership hire McDonald's type employees instead of slightly failed but still intelligent university stem grads? They don't cost more, since it's all pay for performance.

PGs take on why early stage VCs gain so much experience reminds me of my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience.

I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000 cars for over $100 million.

(Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these benefits would come from 2 years)

I made close to 50,000 phone calls, leaving probably 20,000 voicemails. I closed atleast 1000 deals purely on the phone.

I've heard excuses, stalls, lies, promises and objections over 10,000 times.

I've seen thousands of married couples discuss if they should go ahead with spending $30-100k. I've seen how they interact while waiting. (Nothing pains me more than couples, or moreso one party, playing games on their phones ignoring each other).

While there is a lot more to modern tech sales than just closing incoming leads, I think car sales is an accelerator course for interacting with, reading, and closing people.

One of the goto success stories of our generation, Facebook, is based on a university student acting extremely immorally as he stole the idea from people he agreed to build said idea for.

Then you wrote your original message in a very odd way, implying it was because of the WhatsApp use that you did not join. Not harping on you, just an FYI in case you're learning the language or would like to increase communication skills.

Nothing has made me dislike meetup more than this message has.

It seems to be used constantly for hiring, which seems like it should also be illegal but apparently isn't.

Saying you want to hire a white guy even sounds illegal. But saying you want to hire a minority is applauded.

I can imagine this same rule can slowly slide to allow for firing certain people as long as it protects the current protected class.

Very few people heat their homes with electricity. It's the most expensive energy source. So while the heat is atleast useful in the winter, most people would prefer to take the TV idle spend and apply that to a much cheaper heat source.

Right wing sites/blogs/forums are saying that this implies white people, probably white straight men, will be more likely to be laid off because it is supposedly harder for minority group members of various types to replace their job than it is a white male.

Idk if this is true, but that's how the right is reading this.

I don't even think this would work without disconnecting from the main source via your breaker, so workers down stream are perfectly safe.

And I don't see how putting 10-15 amps through a cord, plug, and outlet that routinely handle 15 amps downstream everyday causes a fire risk. My house doesn't freak out when I operate a space heater, and I don't see why it would freak out if I push a space heaters power through that exact same setup.

The cord is dangerous, in the sense that you could get shocked by your generator. You can get shocked by the thousands of rusted, rewired, half functioning generators on Craigslist without every using a cord like this.

In the US, lifetime odds of dying in a car are almost 1 in 100.

I risk death by car almost everyday because I want a nicer house than I could afford if I lived within walking distance of my job.

Let people have their plugs. I doubt 1 in 100 buyers are killing themselves accidentally.

What I want to know is, is this actual software sold for $20 million a year?

Or does this software "facilitate" $20 million of revenue, instead of generate it single handedly.

What if were talking about a car sales website that 'generates' $20 million in revenue via selling 500 $40k cars?

For all we know it's a car auction website and it selling 500 $40,000 cars.

Like the company actually buys the cars and sells them. $20 million revenue, cost of goods $18.5 million.

For all we know this website could be replaced with eBay or a cheap car dealer SAaS website.

This thread is confusing. Are you implying that Canada can't deny entry to Canada to an American?

Canada denies entry to tons of Americans. Americans with a DUI on their record have trouble visiting Canada.

It's pretty rare for "bad customer service" to cost people tens of thousands in lost revenue and pretty severe reputation loss for their business. I've had some bad customer service before, but it never set me back months or years of progress before.

So while I agree this is basically an issue of bad customer service, it is at the most egregious level. If your mortgage company started foreclosing on your home incorrectly, or the title company said "new phone who dis?" when you tried to sell your home, it wouldn't just be called "bad customer service". These are life altering issues. And these companies just don't care. A little public shaming of the people walking into work of a company like that could do some good.

Do you feel this way about all protests? Or just ones based around protecting people's incomes?

If people actually looked at what they were paying for MS Office over a decade they'd wonder wtf they were doing.

Small numbers are easier to sell. Before a company spends $20k on a PM tool, they would discuss it to death. But signing up for $299 a month and giving it a shot is easier.

Stripe has an office in San Francisco. I definitely don't recommend trying to go inside, but I really wish people would organize protests at these business locations. If hundreds of people protested outside stripe for canceling customers with zero communication, maybe the employees would notice.

Just because there's a gap doesn't mean someone is being discriminated against. Shorter men could have self esteem issues that cause them to perform a little worse or fight for salary a little worse.

I worked in sales for a decade. I was better than top 1% at it nationwide. I'm 6'4". Was that because people just love buying from a tall person, or was it because I felt comfortable walking up to anyone and everyone since I was taller than them?

Isn't the cost of electricity basically that, or do you mean increase the price to where it actually hurts hard to even exist?

I don't see this really addressing the fact that deleting data permanently after you find out the FBI wants to look at those devices is a bit weird.

I understand why people want to erase hard drives permanently and totally. My point was more about, isn't it a little weird to do so after the FBI says they want to look into the status of said devices.