A Failed Pizza Delivery Experiment

Are you following your "career plan"? You know, the one all your school counselors insisted you needed by the time you walked out of their doors for the final time? Me either, although my "career plan" was as ephemeral as the wispy steam off your cars hood after a good washing in the bright sun. It went something like this; "I want to get a job that pays enough money so I don't have to move back home."  So in a sense I continue to follow my plan.
I knew my B.S. (how appropriate!) in English wouldn't open a lot of doors, but without a paycheck I was headed home.

So I got work cleaning the assembly line chains that carried frozen hamburgers through a tunnel of flames at the Ypsilanti Burger King. Sorry to say that doesn't even make the top ten list for my worst jobs ever. However, I vigilantly scoured the help wanted columns hoping for anything that didn't involve fries. Then my girlfriend's roommate mentioned her Uncle George was a New Car Sales Manager at a car dealership and needed salespeople. 

George was a very nice, down to earth gentleman in a suit and tie wearing a big, gold Masonic ring. 

We kind of hit it off and he hired me on the spot. I learned a lot from Uncle George besides how to sell Gremlins.He was a Southern gentleman you didn't want to cross. He'd spent years at different dealerships and understood how they worked from the front door to the bump shop.
I thought of him recently when I read this article in the Sunday paper.
George taught me that  when a dealer takes delivery of a new car, two invoices are sent from the factory: one to the dealership, the other to the financial institution that carried the dealership's "floor plan". The financial institution would pay the factory and the dealership would pay the institution interest payments every month until the day the car sold, at which point they would pay off the original invoice.
Usually the financial company also handled loans for the new and used cars we sold but we weren't under any obligation to  push their financing over any other bank or loan company.
It's a good thing too. An unusual feature that our
financial institution, Commercial Credit, saddled us with was that if our customer financed their new car through them and the loan went bad, the car would be repossessed and our dealership would get it back to sell again for the balance owed.
And trust me, repossessed cars are not cream puffs ready to be put on the lot for sale. Most often the cost of repairs exceeded the amount owed to Commercial Credit.
A couple of years before I started selling there, Tom Monaghan , the founder of Domino's Pizza, was trying to build up his business with fast, free delivery. Someone convinced him that the red, white, and blue Javelins AMC was making were just the eye catching type of car that would make Domino's "fast" delivery memorable, patterned as they were after Javelin's Trans-Am racers.
So he bought a whole slew of them. They were seen all over Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor racing around with vinyl bags on the seat packed with boxes of steaming pizza.
But the Javelins didn't hold up well with the fleet of barely post pubescent drivers and as the cars ran out of warranty, Monaghan ran out of patience and quit paying for them.
One by one the Javelins disappeared from the streets until finally there were none.
Fortunately for our dealership, Monaghan had used Dominos' bank for the car loans so our dealership wasn't strapped with a couple of dozen pooped out, dented up Javelins.
Reading about Domino's "new" delivery car made me smile...and wonder who's financing them.
In other countries Domino's uses less expensive delivery vehicles. That's probably best for everyone.