BLENDING THE RULES

I was really engrossed by your feature on modern motor oil (‘Lube under pressure’, September 2018) and would like to share a story of my experiences in car sales in the mid-1960s. Back then, I was a salesman at a local main dealership for a major manufacturer. The owner’s father was a large, domineering man – I suppose the nearest comparison you can make is with Al Capone in the 1930s – and his success in selling secondhand cars had bought him a large ostentatious property not far from the original garage site. His body language was every bit as intimidating. He had his own ideas about generating ‘extra profits’ from forecourt sales and he was always trying to introduce his own brand of customer care to the system.

My first introduction to this was on one visit to the ‘original’ garage to deliver a car. He gave me a comprehensive lecture of how to make extra money when topping up the oil on the forecourt. He would drain every last drip of oil from all those little one-pint tin cans served on the forecourt, using a metal funnel to pour the contents into a single 50-gallon oil drum in the back of the garage. No matter what the viscosity of each little tin – 20W50, sae30 and the rest – it all went into the same drum. The pièce de résistance, as it were, was in pouring this unholy concoction back into lovely glass Castrol Oil jars from the 1950s, which were proudly displayed at the petrol pumps, and sold to unsuspecting motorists.

No protection for the consumer in those days! Keith Sanders