My Grandpa Was a Car Salesman

My Grandpa on my mother's side was a car salesman.  I never got to meet him, which sometimes I think was a good thing and sometimes a bad thing.  He was an alcoholic and could be a mean drunk.  He cheated on his wife and his son (my uncle) caught him at a fairly young age.  I heard stories from my mother.  There were also funny stories, too, though.  He would carry his Manhattans on the boat with him in a thermos.  My mother had some great memories of parking the boat near Jones Beach in New York and going over to dance at the bandshell.

One of the stories I heard often was about Grandpa's customers.  He could tell who had money and who didn't.  In those days, he saw that poor people would get dressed up in their finest when they went out, wanting to impress people.  They'd be cleaned up completely and looking the best they could manage.  People who had money tended to do the opposite, thinking by looking dirty and dingy ("poor") they would somehow play on his sympathy and get a cheaper price on a car.

When I started working in the hotel industry, I noticed the same thing.  Well, a little different, but the same.  People who were looking to play on your sympathy would be very upfront about what a tight budget they were on or how grandma had just died and they needed to get away.  There was no limit to the stories they would tell to try to get a cheaper rate or get away with something.  Were they true?  Who knows? I kind of doubt it, though.  A few times I caught people in their lies, enough to make me jaded.

One particular incident stood out.  On weekends we had a 2 night minimum stay.  People would often rent one night or not the other.  There were ways around it, especially if you wanted to chance it and wait until the week before to see if any rooms were still available.  There was a group of two families that only wanted one night, but ended up renting the room for two.  They stayed the first night, then went to a local amusement park all day, leaving all of their things in the room.  That was also an issue, if I remember - they wanted a :late checkout" so they didn't have to leave everything in the cars all day while they were at the park.  When they returned that evening at 6PM, the story was that one of the adults was on a transplant waiting list and got "the call" while they were out so they were leaving a day early.  All of them.  Both families.  Everyone at the desk was fawning over them like "isn't that amazing!"  I called bullshit, not to their faces.  If someone was that sick, why would they have even traveled that far away from the city?  And why would both families have to leave?

I'm sure they got a good laugh out of it.  Boy, did they put one over on the hotel.

I see that now in my job working for a small company that rents luxury properties in Colorado, Utah, and Florida.  We get requests for quotes with the biggest sob stories about budgets and why they need a vacation.  I'd say at least half of our requests come through like that.

Dear Royal Caribbean: My son is on the autism spectrum and is about to graduate high school.  He also suffers with Crohns Disease and gets medication for that to the tune of $13k every 8 weeks. With the state of healthcare in the US, I just really don't know how long we will be able to continue the treatment and his life depends upon it.  His dream was to see Italy and we thought the best way to do this is on a cruise, but we are on a tight budget.  What's the best you can do for us?

If I had sent that to Royal Caribbean when booking our cruise next year, what do you think would have happened?  I would have likely gotten the same quote that I ended up booking it for without all of the drama.

The people who are really going through this stuff rarely advertise it.  They're the ones that book a vacation and when they arrive you find out the story, maybe from one of the kids or something.  When I was at the hotel, there were kids we could tell were going through some stuff and I'd go out of my way to help them if I encountered them on my shift.  Sometimes it was buying them a bag of candy from our shop, or printing out coloring pages of their favorite character to take with them.

When people are looking for a discount, I'm always skeptical.  I think it goes back to those stories of my grandfather, plus a good b.s. detector.  I hate that society seems to think it's perfectly fine to lie your way to a discount or whatever you want.  I wonder what the kids of that family who lied about being on the transplant list will grow up to be like.