Is Your Salesperson Calling You a Bogue?

The first time I heard the word ‘bogue’ was when I was training to work at a car dealership. I wasn’t sure what the word meant, but my manager used a negative tone when he said it. It wasn’t long before he’d used the word enough times for me to figure it out. He was referring to guests with a low credit score while trying to buy a car. He warned us that a bogue wouldn’t attempt to negotiate the price of the car.

He used the word bogue so many times that it made me uncomfortable. I thought maybe he had made the word up himself, so I googled the term after leaving. There was only one entry on Urban Dictionary that defined the word the same way as my manager used it, and I couldn’t help wondering if he’d been the one to define it.

While I understood I was making commission and a customer like that could cost me a sale, I tried to see things from the ‘bogue’s’ point of view. It wasn’t hard to see things from their perspective, since my car isn’t the greatest, and one reason I’d accepted the job was because I hoped to upgrade my car. These ‘bogues’ were trying to improve their situation, which was the same thing I was doing. They didn’t deserve to be made fun of because they had bad credit, it was likely they were embarrassed and desperate.

The word bogue was thrown around regularly. In fact, I was probably the only person who didn’t call the guests that. They used it during morning meetings, credit checks, and any other place where the guests weren’t present. The other salespeople used it, including those who had started when I did.

It didn’t take long before I had my experience with someone my managers described as a bogue. A young couple came in to buy a car. They admitted to me they didn’t have the best credit and every other dealership they’d been to had denied them. They also confided in me the car was going to be used for work. I didn’t have high hopes that they’d be approved, but 80 percent of working at a car dealership was just waiting around for customers to show up, so I tried to help them.

Two of my managers called the couple bogues, one manager even told me that the male customer hadn’t paid his student loans. Somehow, the pair ended up being approved for a car I knew they couldn’t afford, and I made my first sale. I hated it because the entire time I was wondering if I’d done a bad thing by helping them get a car they couldn’t afford. They either didn’t care or didn’t realize because they seemed overjoyed because they were getting a car. I told myself that maybe the car would open more opportunities for them to make money.

One manager who called the couple ‘bogues’ gave another salesperson half of the credit for my sale, despite him offering me no help on the sale. It was one of the many reasons I decided I didn’t care to work in car sales.

My feelings of distrust for the dealership grew when they claimed that our friends and family would be low-hanging fruit and we should try to bring in our clients. I had never viewed my friends and family as ‘low hanging fruit’ and thought it was disgusting that they were being thought of like that by anyone.

Panic bells rang when one of my friends decided she wanted to buy a car. They also called her a ‘bogue’, although they didn’t do it as much as they had with the other guests. They didn’t bother to try as hard to get her approved as they had with the couple I’d helped. The way my friend was treated without even knowing was appalling.

When I finally left the dealership, I wondered how the customers felt about the way they were treated. Of course, I knew they wouldn’t know they were being name-called or viewed only to make a profit, but I figured some of them had at least seen through the fakeness of their salesperson.

I was shocked to find that most of their reviews came from people who worked at the dealership or people who were related to them. I read a review from a girlfriend proclaiming that her boyfriend (who was in her profile picture) was the best salesperson at the dealership. Mothers were ranking their sons, and multiple people with the same last name as the owner said they’d been treated well at the dealership. It took about ten minutes to find a review from an actual customer.

Although I learned a lot in my short time working at a car dealership, I soon learned that the work wasn’t for me. Between the name-calling and the stealing, I find it to be a very cutthroat business. While I could make a decent amount of money by working at a car dealership, I know their practices wouldn’t make me happy and I’m choosing to focus on things that make me happy.