Forty years ago, when the interstate highway system was being built, a subbreed of salesmen grew up around the bustling automobile business -- agile, slick, clever men, willing to stretch or bend the truth if it meant an extra buck. Today there's a new highway system, the information highway, under construction, and with its siren call to profit has come another swarm of slicksters climbing aboard the computer bandwagon. Not every PC salesman is a fast-buck artist, to be sure, but they are out there. To get a closer look at their tactics, Time Digital placed a writer undercover for two weeks in a New York City computer store that shall remain nameless. His report:

I always thought I would make a good computer salesman. I've been hooked on computers ever since I found out in fourth grade that you could play Space Invaders on them without having to drop quarters. For more than 15 years I've followed the latest models in computer magazines the way others follow stereo equipment or cars, marking my years as much by the acceleration of my modem from 300 baud to 33.6 kbps as by the records I bought. I'm the one people turn to for advice when they're thinking about a new computer purchase.

Though I lacked retail-sales experience, I considered myself a good explainer of megabytes and megahertz. I at least seemed able to sell myself: I was hired on the spot in the kind of store that in spite of chains, malls and mail order is still a Main Street fixture across America. The display window facing the bustling Manhattan street was a Nativity scene of the latest computing miracles -- machines the size and weight of a hardcover book that cost nearly half their weight in gold and can manipulate sound and video better than many bulky desktop systems.

"We're not like the chains," the owner told me as we discussed my pay: $100 a day as an advance against 15% of the profit on my weekly sales. That means about five systems every day, I calculated in my head, just to earn the advance. At least I was quick enough at the math. The goal, he said, was to make the most of the customer: "We advertise a lot of great deals; we have a lot of very knowledgeable people who keep coming back to us because we give them a good price. That's all fine -- but it's not how you're going to make real money." He proceeded to pull up the previous week's sales stats on his computer, a dusty Compaq. "Here, look at this sale. A $3,000 PR profit return] on one of the new Toshibas."

"A $450 commission on one sale," I marveled, just before noticing that it accounted for more than a third of the master salesman's weekly take. (Even the best seem to top out before reaching $70,000 a year.) "All I ask in the beginning is that you don't keep a live one to yourself," he said. "Pass that customer to someone who knows how to really work him -- use Steve if he's around; he can get them so they don't know up from down."

I started on a Tuesday, the store's busiest day, thanks to an ad that ran in a national newspaper. None of my customers were $450 commissions. First there was a guy from Brooklyn calling to see if we stocked a replacement battery for a 486 machine that his friend had built for him from mail-order parts. The battery specifications meant absolutely nothing to me: "3.6v external, 4-prong, 16 milliamps." I dutifully took his name and number and said I'd check.

The most promising customer was an L.A. screenwriter taking time off from a movie that was filming in New York. He seemed flush with success, wearing a fashionable tweed jacket and jeans. I gave him the tour of IBM's line of ThinkPad laptops for about 25 minutes. I liked him. "The 560 is my favorite," I confided, even though the $3,695 machine was on sale, and the PR wasn't any better than selling a refurbished desktop for $895. "The thing weighs next to nothing, only 4.1 lbs., and it's got the best keyboard and screen you can get on a laptop." When he finally left -- without buying -- one of the other salesmen told me flatly, "I could tell he was just a tourist." I called the Brooklyn man back and told him I didn't know, but that if he brought in the battery, we could check with the service department. Anything to get him in the store.

The best prospects are called "gimmes." A gimme is anyone who calls or comes into the store and says, "Give me..." without first asking the price. Sometimes these people don't know about computers, but many gimmes are frighteningly well informed about the machines they want: "Now, the IBM ThinkPad 760ED has built-in mpeg2, but the Toshiba Tecra 730CDT can handle 1024x768 svga, right?" They already have high-end machines, and they have been reading about the newest model since before the manufacturer officially announced it. They are the poster boys of techno-lust. Even though the new wonder machine supposedly started shipping from the factory three weeks ago, they've been unable to get their hands on one. They're calling because they saw the store's newspaper ad that said, "Call for Price and Info!" or "In Stock!" in the same boldface type used elsewhere in the ad for prices.

I started listening to the salesman next to me when I heard him say matter-of-factly into the phone, "Yes, we have the IBM 760ED in stock." It was one of the most expensive computers and, at the time, also one of the hardest to get. I could almost hear the caller breathe with relief -- "I've been looking all over for it. How much?" -- because the salesman next said, "$8,999." List was already an astronomical $6,999, putting a $2,000 premium on a marginally faster processor. The basic functionality on high-end laptops is rarely all that different from that of a machine costing half as much, but the latest IBM ThinkPad can pack the sex appeal of a corporate jet where the leather seats still smell factory-fresh.

I fiddled on the calculator while listening to the sale in progress. Figuring in the c-line (cost to dealer), I thought, that's already a $262 commission. "Supply of this machine is extremely constrained right now, as you may know. If you can wait 15 business days, I can give you a much better price." This was both a bluff and an explanation of gouging, like saying, "I can get you great tickets for the World Series -- around Thanksgiving." The next I knew, he was selling the gimme extra memory and a carrying case. "Do you prefer red or green piping on the bag?"

There are many techniques for bringing the sale around if the customer balks at a high price. "The price can always go down," the owner tutored me, "but it can never go back up." You can "discover," for instance, that the only model in stock is loaded with an extra 32 megabytes of memory, which accounts for the above-list quote. This works the other way too: I once watched a salesman charge a college professor an extra $395 to "upgrade" an internal CD-ROM drive to the 6x speed that already came standard with the machine. And when a customer is willing to pay the higher price, salesmen always find a way to close the deal, even if the computer isn't in stock. "Make the sale," the owner told me, "then let us worry about the details." If the person was in the store, it turned out that the machine was at the warehouse. The store had no warehouse.

The simplest way to solve an inventory problem is to "s/w" the customer to something that's in stock (s/w comes from switch, as in bait-and-switch; it is both noun and verb). We advertised the well-known Toshiba Satellite 110CS, even though all we had in stock was the Satellite 115CS -- essentially the same machine but packaged for sale through consumer-oriented chains with extra software, a carrying case and a shorter warranty. At some point the large store unloaded some of the machines it had got at volume discount, and they ended up at my store.

My 760ED friend explained the s/w tactic: "Write up the 110CS sale. Then once you have the credit card, you mention as an afterthought, 'We've got a great carrying case designed specifically for this machine. It's only $75.' Then you push the software; then you switch." Most customers, he promised, would happily switch to the 115CS for $100 extra, convinced of their own shrewdness. If they didn't, the 115CS would be shipped to them "by accident," still at a slight profit.

The most blatant switch concerned the desktop machines located near the entrance. The store could easily have carried the sexiest new Compaqs or Hewlett-Packards that the chains were busy pushing, but the profit margins on those models are extremely tight. "You might as well be selling vcrs," the manager said dismissively of the fully loaded PCs. "They advertise those machines during football games."

The store did much better with laptops, and most of the big computers they stocked were closeout specials advertised at less than $1,000. The prices were so attractive because the machines were refurbished: returns that had been repaired or repackaged by the factory. To make them even more seductive, the store added a small cosmetic touch: working in the stockroom with a blow dryer and a razor blade, they carefully removed the unsightly refurbished label. Most of these customers were parents or students buying a first computer; the yuppies all wanted laptops.

One Packard-Bell machine came standard with a 75-megahertz Pentium processor, 1.2-gigabyte hard disc, 4x cd-rom drive, 14.4 fax-modem and monitor. A summer ago, the processor would have been considered blazing, the hard disc enormous and the package complete for everything from video games to office work and online access. But that was then. If it weren't for the monitor, the store would be making a respectable $225 profit selling the factory-refurbished machines at the advertised price of $895. The problem was that the cost (actually the "schlepp price," slightly inflated by the store owners to keep sales commissions down) on the store's cheapest color monitors was $140, reducing the profit to less than $100.

The trick, I soon learned, was to s/w the customer to a better monitor. "All you're doing is giving the customer some more options," explained Mr. 760ED. "Once you've made the sale, then you start talking to them about upgrading." Mr. Zenith seemed to be the best at it. He was another salesman who consistently switched Toshiba and ThinkPad buyers to the Zenith Z-Note laptop. The machine matched the high-end features -- a cd-rom drive that could be swapped for a floppy drive without turning the machine off, a big active-matrix screen, a fast processor -- but the cost was at least $1,200 less. The profit was bigger, even if you sold the Zenith at list for hundreds of dollars less than the Toshiba or ThinkPad, but Mr. Zenith sometimes tried to get people to pay a premium. "It's actually a better machine," he'd insist, citing the slightly larger hard disc.

At the end of the Packard-Bell sale, Mr. Zenith mentioned as an aside that he didn't personally care for the included monitor: "It's a great deal, but I'm picky. I prefer a higher-quality monitor if I'm going to be sitting in front of it for hours at a time." The parent, who was buying a machine so his eight-year-old daughter could be computer literate, was already listening, since Mr. Zenith had been discussing the great deal he was getting. "It runs all the same software," he admonished, and the father nodded in agreement. "It's crazy how some people will spend an extra $1,500 just to have the latest thing."

Then Mr. Zenith made it a little more intimate. "Let me show you something," he said, leading the customer away from the cashier's counter to one of the computers on display. Turning on its screen, he said in confidence, "The 14-in. monitor you're getting is a dot-41 pitch. That's a measurement of how fine the screen dots are." The computer screen flickered into focus...kind of. "If you look closely, you can see that the display is not as crisp as on this dot-28 display over here." Mr. Zenith threw in a bit of consumer education -- "The lower the number, the better when you're talking about monitor dot pitch" -- and then delivered the profit-making offer. "Now if you want to upgrade, I can get you to a $399 dot-28 monitor for only $150, since you're buying a whole system."

Dad squinted at the dot-41 monitor as the offer sank in, and Mr. Zenith pointed to a larger screen nearby. "I've even got a bigger, 15-in. dot-28 that this system can take full advantage of. The regular price is $499, but the manufacturer is doing a promotion right now. There's a rebate we get to redeem. I can give you that upgrade for only $200." The father was modest; he opted for the $150 upgrade. It cost the store only $20 more, pushing the PR back up to a worthwhile $170. If he had passed, Mr. Zenith would have offered him a $100 upgrade to a dot-39 monitor ($299 list), which was the same monitor that shipped with the package. The dot-41 monitor on display? It was a prop that had been disabled by one of the technicians. No matter how much you fiddled with the sharpness dial below the screen, the pixels never lost their subtle fuzz.

In my two weeks I learned that salesmen scout for fools with as much a sense of justice as the cops on TV look for criminals. If someone is stupid enough to pay $699.95 for an 8-megabyte memory upgrade that should cost $145 at most, the logic goes, he had it coming. It's a kind of stupid tax collected by the store, a form of punishment meted out to the ignorant. If this means emptying the pockets of a shmuck, then you tell yourself that no one spends rent money on a computer. The relative smallness of the material rewards only seems to enhance the moral and aesthetic rationalizations. The man who made the sale -- Mr. 760ED, in fact -- can feel good all day, go home and be nice to his wife and kids. There's nothing like a job well done.