We aren’t exactly lacking in stories these days about people disputing numbers in the state of Michigan, but this one is too interesting to pass up.
Tomorrow marks two years since the end of a lawsuit over who had the world record in car sales.
It probably won’t surprise you to know that for a lot of people in sales, more and bigger sales are usually better.
It’s not bad to be able to advertise yourself as the number one seller in the world, right?
That was the strategy of Joe Girard, a Chevrolet salesman in the Detroit area who was the #1 salesman every year from 1966 to 1977.
His best year: 1973, when he sold 1,425 cars.
I did the math, that’s at least five cars sold every work day.
And it was enough to give Girard the Guinness World Record for auto sales.
He even went on to a second career, writing books and giving motivational speeches as “the world’s greatest salesman.”
But in 2017, another Michigan salesman, Ali Reda, announced he’d sold over 1,500 cars in a year, and said he’d learned how from Girard’s book.
And that’s when the lawsuits began.
Girard claimed his speaking career had been hampered because someone else claimed to be the best.
Reda, who was proud of his achievement, countersued.
But in a way, it wasn’t the courts that sorted the whole controversy out, it was Guinness.
The world record trackers said that because there was no independent body to verify sales, they couldn’t track the record anymore.
And that was that.
How about something much calmer? Like, apples?
J. Pereira is known for sculpting apples into ornate and lovely new shapes.
You could try this over Thanksgiving if you’ve got some apples.
Or you could just eat the apple and leave the sculpting to the expert.
Either way, you’ve got yourself an apple!
5 Guinness World Records Controversies (Mental Floss)
Lawsuits dropped over car sales record; Guinness opts to no longer track that particular record (Dearborn Press and Guide)
Watch this expert apple sculptor create juicy delights (Boing Boing)
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Auto dealership photo by Andrew Bone via Flickr/Creative Commons
