Long, long before you first got your license, 100 year-old Derrell Alexander was selling Chevrolets – a job that he still retains to this day, after 69 years of continuous work.
Automotive News profiled this Mr. Alexander, who first started working at a Chevrolet dealership in Douglas, Wyoming in 1946. After 16 years, he moved about 50 miles away to the area of Casper, and began selling at White’s Mountain Motors in 1962. That dealership has changed ownership four different times in the 53 years that Alexander has worked there, but through it all, there he was.
The dealership’s current New-Car Manager Marco Castillo said about the centenarian: “Sixty-year-old ladies remember him selling their parents cars. Rarely will there be somebody [who] he doesn’t remember what car they had or something about them.”
That attentiveness to the customer is largely how Alexander has stayed in the game for so long. “I meet a lot of interesting people from all walks of life,” he says. Of course, as he has aged, so have his regular customers; he now deals frequently with the children – and even grandchildren – of his old regulars.
Mr. Derrell Alexander summarized his selling tactics thusly: “Stay with them until they buy or die.”
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