The office staff here could be imitating art except that their one liners are too good to have been written by a dramatist - and what they are up to is a little more serious than selling paper in Slough.
The front runner for the role of David Brent at the offices of Yes Car Credit in Croydon is a former policeman charged with ensuring that an array of somewhat green second hand car salesmen do exactly what he wants.
At least 25 stone with a paunch, this man cuts a terrifying figure within the office.
He will not be pleased when he realises that his antics and those of his subordinates have been caught by a member of the BBC staff working undercover as a salesman.
Don’t do nice
Richard Newman worked at the branch for six weeks last summer as a so called Car Finance Advisor and secretly filmed the extravagant behaviour for BBC One’s Whistleblower.
Undercover reporter Richard Newman uncovered bad behaviour
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Threatening to stamp on the staff’s mobile phones and bemoaning their apparent lack of success in boosting sales figures, the former policeman told them: “I want meetings with my area manager to be sweetness and light but how can I” before blasting his staff with obscenities.
He also told his staff that they were like “a load of” James P Sullivans from the kids film Monsters Inc.
Urging them on ever upwards, he told them that they are Automotive Ghostbusters, asking “when all else fails who are the customers going to call? We are here to make money. We don’t do nice”.
Greed and fear
The BBC filmed at Croydon after receiving a spate of complaints from Yes Car customers - over 1,000 to date - who say they have been lied to, sold expensive insurance and finance packages as well as cars that are over-priced and not up to scratch.
The behaviour of the staff that were filmed veered from the highly offensive to the highly questionable.
Sales staff were shown lying to customers in order to sell car finance and insurance as well as cars.
The most obvious trick was to do a pretend phone credit check, just to get the customer to come in for another finance insurance
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On one occasion a customer was threatened with credit blacklisting if she did not come in as planned.
Poor targets
On average, Yes added 2,000 to the recommended price of their cars. In some cases this doubled the price.
However, after taking into account the costs of finance and insurance - as well as finance for the insurance - we found people who ended up paying four times the normal cost of the car.
We found a car worth little more than 3,000 was coming in at nearly 12,000.
The customers are some of the ten million people who cannot borrow from mainstream lenders in this country.
Three tesco finance car insurance
brothers from Liverpool, called the Newbys, opened their first branch in Liverpool in 1997.
Five years later and they’d sold up for 141m.
The new owners, a huge public company called Provident Financial, also specialise in selling credit to poor people, aimed to rapidly expand the business.
Dangerous practice
The BBC also placed a garage inspector, Martin Woodhouse, at Croydon for three weeks posing as an mechanic.
Again the script was comedic, although this time it wasn’t just people’s finances that were being threatened but their safety.
When questioned about the garage’s approach to servicing, the man in charge of the workshops shut his eyes and waved his hands around saying “it’s Stevie Wonder services here”.
An insurance agent finance career change campaign spoke grandly of the company’s 125 point vehicle check.
However when our inspector asked a colleague about this, he merrily shrugged his shoulders and said he “just ticked anything”.
Our inspector said that there was not even the equipment to carry out the full checks.
He was told that there was only a limited budget to spend on repairing each car, most of which seemed to go on tyres and brakes.
On some occasions when he identified faults, such as leaking shock absorbers, he was told to wipe them down and try and get them through the MOT.
He was told that the company policy was not to replace cam belts even when they were way past their replacement date.
Only half jokingly the chief technician told him “We don’t do perfect.”
The most startling behaviour was reserved for the clients and might go some way to explaining why some staff were happy to go along with the sales system.
One set of customers were described as “Wayne and Waynetta slob, pond life, single cell amoebas”.
Whistleblower will be broadcast on BBC One at 2100 on Wednesday 16 March 2005.
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