“Woman’s touch” in car sales

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32976, 24 July 1972, Page 7

“Woman’s touch” in car sales

Joy Kennedy, the 33-year-old blond wife of a Navy warrant officer and mother of two, would seem to be an unlikely candidate to sell anyone an automobile. In fact, she recalls, the first time her husband went to sea a few years ago, “1 found out that I didn’t even know how to lift the cat hood. I knew you turn the ( key and the car starts, but that was about it.” During the last year, however, Mrs Kennedy has become the sales-floor superstar of Jon Duringer Chevrolet, a small dealership in Coronado, California. The former housewife has been selling 12 or more cars each month and drawing a handsome $11,500 in commissions for her first year on the job. Joy Kennedy is not unique at Duringer Chevrolet; of Duringer’s eight - member sales team—including a second dealership in Imperial Beach—six are women hired over the last 12 months. Duringer, a big, burly man and a car dealer for 13 years,

decided to give women a chance after discovering that in an average year his allmale sales staff turned over three times. “For years I’ve had one or two quality salesmen and three or four marginal floorwalkers,” he said. “Male salesmen are in the bar all the time getting loaded. Half of them are divorced and chasing women. In a small town like ours, you can’t have that kind of thing.” So Duringer placed a newspaper advertisement advising women that “if you’re willing to work, I’m willing to teach.” Within a few days, more than 60 women had answered the advertisement. Today, with sales up by more than 20 per cent, Duringer is understandably pleased with the results of his experiment. “The average salesman was selling eight or nine cars a month for me,” he says, “but some of my women are selling 12 ■or 13 cars a month.” While Detroit’s Big Three report that women are signing on at other dealerships across the country, few if any auto dealers match Duringer’s extraordinary ratio of six women to only two men. Most of Duringer’s women are novices in the auto business, and some, like

Mrs Kennedy, had never sold anything before. Duringer sent his staff through the General Motors truck and car training centre at Burbank. “Sure, we had to teach them something about mechanics,” he said. “But, hell, most salesmen don’t know anything about the workings of a car.” Saleswoman Christina Hunter, 28, recalls that when she started, “I knew absolutely nothing at all about cars except what colour they were.” And the attractive native of the Philippines, who is married to an ex-Navy man, notes that “I still don’t go into the mechanics of cars. I prefer to tell people how comfortable they are.” At Burbank, the women encountered some initial resistance from the male that quickly faded, however, when they discovered that a saleswoman, i Barbara Chase, a former sports-car racer, knew how to strip and reassemble an [engine. Occasionally, showi room visitors tell Mrs Ken- | nedy that they would like to “speak to the salesman” when she approaches them but, she adds quickly, “once they get over the shock they start acting like normal customers.”

Spurred by Duringer’s success, several local dealers ;have followed his example, adding one or two women to their showroom staffs. And [that development could defeat i Duringer’s original purpose in hiring women: to reduce high turnover. Recently, one of Duringer’s saleswomen quit to take a job with a Ford dealership across the bay. But in the view of the Duringer sales manager, Kress Drew, that is the wave of the future. “Now that this thing is catching on,” he says, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see the day when women will number 50 per cent and over at every dealership in the country.” — Copyright, “Newsweek.”