Horse Trading in the Age of Cars: Men in the Marketplace (review)

Most readers know from personal experience the reality documented by this book: automobiles are sold under a different ethical and economic dispensation relative to other products. Car buyers do not pay list price, cannot return their purchase if dissatisfied, and must haggle and even lie before going home with a shiny new automobile. However familiar this “retail exceptionalism,” as Steven Gelber terms it (p. 15), his is the first scholarly monograph exclusively dealing with the subject.

By situating the history of men selling four-wheeled transportation in the older tradition of selling four-legged transport, Gelber persuasively demonstrates how horse-trading traditions carried over into the automobile age. His first chapter marshals the limited hard data pertinent to the selling of horses in the nineteenth century, and we learn that professional horse traders came in essentially two types: “barn traders,” who kept inventory and sold from a fixed locale, and “road traders,” who sold horses door-to-door. The latter were itinerant peddlers who, along with tinware, notions, and inexpensive clocks, led an extra nag or two in their quest for profit. Ordinary citizens also sold horses, not to make a living but just as people today might sell an old car no longer needed. The reputation of professional horse traders was poor, Gelber explains, especially road traders who were associated with the widely reviled gypsies, and “‘horse-trader’ was a universally understood synonym for moral reprobate” (p. 8). How-ever morally questionable, horse trading was ubiquitous in nineteenth-century America, and Gelber suggests that men admired traders who could drive hard bargains. Indeed, men generally considered horse trading a particularly American “game” and told jokes and stories about the activity. There was entertainment in two men roughly competing to pull a fast one on the other, and much humor as one of them got his comeuppance, exemplified in the punch line from the joke in which a “shrewd” haggler buys “a champion walking horse in utero” but instead winds up with amule (p. 13).

Six chapters, along with the epilogue, trace the continuing influence of horse-trading practices in automobile sales up to the present. By the time cars first came on the market around 1900, the modern practice of selling goods at fixed prices, accompanied by implied warranties of fitness and suitability plus the right to return them if unsatisfied, had been around for half a century and was all but universal in most retail situations. Early automobile manufacturers tried to emulate these practices, but many factors conspired to make car selling exceptional. Besides the masculine culture of horse trading, there was the problem of used cars. Consumers often had to sell their old car before they could buy a new one, a situation that became all but universal by the mid-1920s. Gelber recounts the many twists and turns in the history of selling cars, such as acute automobile shortages after the end of World War II and during the Korean War, or oversupply during the 1930s and late 1950s. Sellers altered their “game” in response to changing market conditions, but the fundamental realities of wheeling, dealing, and horse trading continued. Even the 1958 federal “sticker” law that mandated the posting on the window of every new car the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) failed to eliminate bargaining. In the 1990s it seemed for a moment as if the internet, which enabled buyers to learn the dealer’s actual costs for a car, might finally end the game, but it turned out that few consumers actually wanted to buy cars online, preferring instead to bargain face-to-face so as to get the best “deal.”

While virtually all professional horse traders were men, some car sales personnel have been women. But as Gelber shows in his final chapter— “Bargaining and Gender”—even today women do not comprise even 10 percent of the automotive sales force. Saturn, which in 1990...