based on the most sophisticated reading of their customers’
character. But the decisions they made on the spur of the
moment as each customer walked through the door was of
another sort. This was an unconscious reaction. They were
silently picking up on the most immediate and obvious fact
about Ayres’s car buyers — their sex and their color — and
sticking with that judgment even in the face of all manner of
new and contradictory evidence. They were behaving just like
the voters did in the 1920 presidential election when they took
one look at Warren Harding, jumped to a conclusion, and
stopped thinking. In the case of the voters, their error gave
them one of the worst U.S. Presidents ever. In the case of the
car salesmen, their decision to quote an outrageously high price
to women and blacks alienated people who might otherwise
have bought a car.
Golomb tries to treat every customer exactly the same
because he’s aware of just how dangerous snap judgments are
when it comes to race and sex and appearance. Sometimes the
unprepossessing farmer with his filthy coveralls is actually an
enormously rich man with a four-thousand-acre spread, and
sometimes the teenager is coming back later with Mom and
Dad. Sometimes the young black man has an MBA from