"Not me," I told him. "Drive that junk? I'll admit you didn't have to swear but a couple of years of your life away. But look at all you get now in a car."
"Mmm, I suppose you're right," he said. "My Orion was stolen a year ago when I accidentally cut off the burglar photocell. The police never did find it and I've been trying ever since to get another one."
"This is the first time I've tried," I said. "My car...."
"Ssh," he interrupted. "Here they come."
A procession of new cars, led by a beautiful green Solar convertible, inched its way along the row of hopeful buyers, all of us with our credit ratings and car histories pinned to our lapels.
Each car's robot mechanism recorded our statistics, took our pictures, noted our heights, weights and appearances, then began to correlate the data.
By government order the robot mechanism was directed to select its most promising future owner. A sobersides bank president, for example, might dearly love to change his big black Galaxy sedan for a low-slung Charioteer sports car, but sports cars were planned with crew-cutted college boys in mind, so the bank president would be likely to end up with another big Galaxy. Of course, the payment rate was fixed and the contracts were almost always for 40 years. A tie salesman might want a Galaxy to make an impression on his neighbors, but he'd probably wind up with a Proton or a Thunderflash like I had. I was a tie salesman.