Car-Salesman ‘Player’ Causes Car-Lot Crisis
By Thom Weidlich for PRCG | Haggerty LLC
Not every crisis is a major facility fire or data breach. Companies must watch for the smaller crises, too. Let’s say, for example, a salesman in your car dealership refuses to sell a vehicle to a customer unless she agrees to a date with him — and video of the discussion goes viral. That’s what happened to Metro Honda in Montclair, California.
As featured on the YouTube channel The Reckoning on Jan. 29, a woman identified only as TikTok creator “rockerfoo13” uploaded a video of her interaction with the salesman at the dealership in Montclair, 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.
“@Honda is this how you sell your cars to your customers?” she asked in the Jan. 21 post. The video, which has more than 10 million views, features the salesman saying to the customer that if she buys the car, she has to take him out on a date. At first, she tries to humor him (“I don’t think the date is included”), but he persists. There’s a lot of back and forth that gets more and more tense.
The customer’s sister is also there and is more adamant about shutting down the salesman. “You’ve been at this for like the past hour,” she says. “At this point, it’s not funny anymore.” “It’s a joke,” he says. “Relax.” He repeats several times that it’s a joke.
Ha-ha.
‘Internet Creep’
At one point, according to rockerfoo13’s account, the salesman said he was raising the car price by $10,000 because she “wouldn’t go out with him.” In other words, the situation got very creepy. As The Reckoning host says, if he had done the date routine once “he probably could have gotten away with this without becoming a viral internet creep.” But he persisted.
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