My father was a good trader, no, actually he was an excellent trader, and one day he told me his secret: You didn’t have anything he just had to have and he didn’t have anything he had to sell.
He told me about this fellow who wanted to buy a machine of some sort from him. Dad’s price was $1,500; the man offered $1,200.
Dad said he told him:
“I could sell it to you for $1,200, but I won’t. Because that would make us both unhappy. You’d be unhappy because you’d say to yourself, ‘I should have offered that old man $1,000. He would have taken a $1,000.'”
“I would have been unhappy too, because I know it’s worth $1,500 and I know I can get $1,500.”
Next day, Dad said, the fellow came back and paid his asking price.
* * *
My father’s desire to have the upper hand caused him to ask one of my brothers, John, to buy him a new car. Dad knew the car salesman would have the advantage and he just couldn’t deal with that.
John told me that he bought the car Dad wanted, drove it away, and then discovered some hamburger wrappers under one of the seats. That caused him to examine the car more carefully. He said there was soot in the tail pipe, and other indicators that the car he bought was, in fact, not new.
John took it back to the dealership.
“I never said it was new,” the salesman told him.
“You said you wanted to buy that car and you made me an offer and I accepted. And you bought yourself a car.”
NOTE: Why didn’t John just look at the odometer? I don’t know. Maybe he did, maybe it had been rolled. Back in the day that was not unusual.
Coming Monday: “All Aboard!”