Yes, it’s crass of car salesmen to assume women don’t know about motors. But (tin hats on!) haven’t they got a point?
TO JUDGE by the response on the internet, the most powerful woman in the global motor industry struck a resounding chord with the sisterhood all over the world this week when she complained that car salesmen often talk down to her because of her sex.
As the chief executive of the French giant Citroen, Linda Jackson says she regularly visits showrooms incognito, to see how rivals are selling their cars.
‘You do learn a lot about how the customer is treated,’ the 58-year- old British grandmother told the mail’s Ray massey. ‘Sometimes you go into a showroom with your husband and they just turn to your male partner and say: “How would you like to spend your money?” This is what we need to change.’
Insulting
Cue a chorus of ‘ hear, hears’ from women in the comments section of mail Online, recounting their own experiences of being patronised by salesmen.
‘I am the earner in my marriage,’ wrote someone who identified herself only as Susiette, of Wonderland, United Kingdom. ‘Earn five times more than my husband, yet when we go to buy something — car, furniture, house — sales person talks to my husband and ignores me.’
At the office yesterday, almost every female colleague I consulted had similar complaints — many of them frothing with fury over the way they’d been treated by car salesmen and mechanics.
One told me that when she took her car to be fixed after she had reversed into a bollard (I must resist the temptation to make a sexist remark about female spatial awareness), the man at the garage sucked his breath through his teeth, shook his head and said: ‘Your husband’s not going to like that!’
What had her husband got to do with it, she wanted to know. It was her car, bought with her earnings. It was none of her husband’s business — and deeply insulting of the mechanic to suggest that it was.
Another complained she was treated like a five-year-old when she took her car back to the garage after she’d had it serviced, explaining that the engine was roaring alarmingly.
‘Well,’ said the mechanic. ‘That’ll be the magic oil we put into it.’
As my friend comments: ‘He would never have said that to a man.’
On that point, we must all agree she’s right. I can also see how infuriating it must be for a distinguished career woman — perhaps I should say for any woman — to be addressed in such a way.
So, yes, the Citroen boss is clearly on to something when she suggests car salesmen should change the way they deal with female customers. These days, it is never a wise idea to say to a woman, as another colleague says she was told at the showroom: ‘Perhaps you’d like to bring your partner along, so you can have a proper look.’
Before I go on to register a plea in mitigation for my fellow males, I should make clear that mrs Jackson seems a thoroughly admirable woman.
Indeed, her story is truly inspirational — how she started work as a teenager in Coventry, stapling invoices at Rover, before rising through a male-dominated industry to lead a mammoth French company selling 1.2 million vehicles worldwide last year.
If I understand her correctly, she is no militant feminist, ranting against male chauvinist pigs or complaining that women get a raw deal in life. No, her purpose in saying that car salesmen should stop patronising women is simply to sell more cars.
She must surely be right. It’s just bad salesmanship to rub up a customer the wrong way — and if my colleagues are any guide, there’s no surer way of annoying a woman who has money to spend on a car than talking down to her or suggesting she needs advice from a man.
Pressure
Nor is mrs Jackson saying, as so many feminists do, that women should be treated exactly the same as men. On the contrary — again, if I’ve got her right — she believes women approach car-buying differently from men.
‘When women go into a dealership, they want to touch, feel and drive the car,’ she says. ‘They don’t want hard pressure. It’s not about being a woman. It’s about how I would want to be treated as a woman.’
By coincidence, I was discussing mrs Jackson’s views in the pub yesterday when we were joined by a bloke who turned out to be a kitchen salesman. Though he came from the other end of the spectrum — by which I mean that the kitchen was traditionally seen as a woman’s province, the garage as a man’s — he agreed with her absolutely on two points. The first was that it can be fatal to a sale to make any assumptions about which partner will make the decisions or pay the bill. There’s an old mantra taught to salesmen, he told me: ‘ASS-U-mE — meaning if I assume anything, I’m making an ASS of U and mE.’
The other was that men and women approach the business of buying kitchens in very different ways. Women tend to be far more practical, he said, imagining the layout of the units in terms of a sequence of tasks such as peeling potatoes — ‘scrape, rinse, bin’.
men, on the other hand — even the keen cooks among them — are simply bewildered when he mimes the process of preparing food. The way to get them to order a kitchen is to demonstrate the mechanics of, say, a sliding cupboard or a bin whose lid lifts when you open the door under the sink. Then they’re enraptured.
Which brings me to my first line of defence of those car salesmen and mechanics who have so infuriated my female colleagues. All right, they may be crass to assume that women know nothing about cars. But let me don my tin hat against the feminist brickbats and suggest that, even in 2017, men generally do tend to be more interested in all things mechanical, and keener on driving.
Fragile
Yes, of course there are huge numbers of exceptions. But when families set off together in the car, it remains far more common to see Dad at the wheel, and mum in the passenger seat, than the other way round. Check it out, next time you’re on the road.
I would also point out that when mechanics talk patronisingly to female customers about ‘magic oil’, the poor saps are just trying to assert their fragile masculinity.
God knows, there are so many things that women are better at than men — multi-tasking, communicating, getting on the jobs ladder, sharing flats with friends, reading people’s characters, bossing their partners around and spending their money.
With the ‘gender pay gap’ fast narrowing, they are also taking over whole professions, outnumbering men at universities, in teaching and in medicine. That’s not to mention the sex of the Prime minister.
As for mrs Jackson, I bet she gets a wonderful buzz from watching car salesmen make fools of themselves by patronising her, when they don’t realise she’s one of the most powerful people in their industry.
The fact is that women are winning the sex war, hands down. So let me end with a plea for mercy. As their victory nears completion, couldn’t women leave us with just a shred of our masculine pride? Can’t they at least let us pretend — if only on a garage forecourt — that we’re the ones who wear the trousers?