"Before we start," Odell said, "introductions, since some of us have spent years in the same building like furniture in adjoining rooms. This is Keisha Boateng. She's an associate in our finance department. She is also — and I want the room to hold both of these facts at once — the person who assembled the numbers we're about to look at, entirely on her own time, because nobody in this building asked her to and she could not, in conscience, leave them unassembled. What she's about to show you is our own work. Ours. She's just the first one of us who read it whole."
Keisha put the first page on the screen. It was not dramatic. That was its horror, which she understood, being a numbers person: drama can be argued with, and a table cannot. Two hundred fourteen deal jackets. Twenty-four months. Columns: buyer, vehicle, lender, buy rate, contract rate, difference, selling salesperson, F&I manager of record. And the summary, in her clean font: average discretionary markup across all jackets, 1.9 points. Average across jackets where the buyer was a repeat customer, a referral, or coded by the floor as a qualified buyer: 0.3 points. Average across the rest: 2.6.
"Miss Boateng," Odell said quietly. "Walk us through one."
She chose Tiana Ross first, and the room went very still, because several people in it had been on the floor that Friday and could suddenly see the showroom again from the waiting-room chairs. The bureau: 712. The lender's approval: 6.4. The contract signed: 8.3. The vehicle: the discontinued sedan from the back corner, sold to her after she had come in asking, by stock number, about a different car. "The difference over the term," Keisha said, in the voice of a woman reading a tide table, "is one thousand one hundred and forty-six dollars. She is an emergency room nurse. She works nights. I don't know if that matters to the table. It isn't a column. I wanted to say it anyway."
Then she walked them through the pattern, and the pattern was the meeting: the markups did not follow credit — credit was a column too, and the correlation was weak tea — they followed the floor. Jackets sold by Blake Thornton and the two men trained under him carried the highest discretionary spread in the building, and the spread within Blake's own jackets split cleanly by a variable that existed nowhere in the lender's paperwork: whether Blake had judged the buyer. Where he'd liked them — his word, the room would learn, from his own worksheets, where he coded customers in pencil in the corner, a practice so casual he had never imagined it read aloud: ST for serious, W for window, and a third code, a small penciled K, whose meaning he would be asked for — the rates came home at buy rate or near it. Where he hadn't, the aquarium finished what the floor began.
"K," Odell said, at last, into the quiet. "Blake. You've been patient. Help the room. The pencil codes. ST, W. And K."
Blake Thornton had spent the weekend becoming a man who had prepared twelve speeches and none of them survived contact with the screen. He looked at the summary table rather than at anyone in it. "K is — " He cleared his throat. "It's lot shorthand, sir. Older than me. K is 'kicker.' Somebody who's going to kick tires and waste the up— waste the rotation. It means — don't put the time in. Send them to used, send them to service, keep the floor clear for—"
"For the STs," Odell said.
"Yes, sir."
"And who taught you to price the K's up in the back office, Blake? No — wait. That's not your chair. The pricing's not yours." Odell turned, with the deliberateness of a man rotating a heavy thing, to the end of the table. "Randy. The discretion was your office's. Two years. Two hundred fourteen jackets, and those are only the ones this young lady could reconstruct from a system that wasn't built to be read this way. I'm going to ask you the question I came with, and I want the room to hear it answered in the language you use among yourselves, because I've heard about a word. The word is yield."
Randy Cobb had decided, over his long reasonable weekend, that the meeting was a storm about feelings, and that his part was to be the driest man in it. "Mr. Barnes, rate participation is lawful, it's disclosed in the sense that the contract rate is the contract rate, the customer signs it, the lender permits a spread, and every volume dealer in the Southeast manages it. It's called yield management and it's how F&I departments in this industry cover their cost of operation. Some buyers negotiate. Some don't. That's a market, sir. Not a conspiracy."