I realize that maybe the person was forced to do it by their boss, and people hate being ghosted, but it was so far out of my idea of social norms that I didn't want to talk to them even more.
If they're not taking the hint after 10 calls with no response, what are they thinking? How far will it escalate?
If I was just busy for a few days and wasn't ghosting them, what do they think they've accomplished?
The salesman was ~half my age, and I knew someone ~twice my age who had bought and serviced a car there and simply said they had no such experience, like I had.
I guess that older people do feel it's more of a faux pas to not return a call. But it's never been normal to go nuclear even so.
I have wondered if the reason for weird stuff at car dealers is simply that, with a commission-based position, you can basically let anybody who thinks they can do it try, and some of them are going to be weird overconfident people.
But I also figure that as a rule, really weird "customer service" is probably management coercion for some stupid reason.
Submitted a request for a quote from a moving company, and included the specific date of move in the request. They called me, gave me a quote, but I opted to go with someone else. Moving date came and went, we got settled in, and about a week later the emails came in.
I would get one email per day informing me that they hadn't heard from me yet and needed to hear from me ASAP if I was still interested. They proceeded to include a comment that said they would not stop emailing me until they heard from me. Each email also appeared to be hand-typed by this person every day.
I wrote an email asking them if they even bothered to notice that my move date had come and gone, but stopped myself because, like you, I was morbidly curious. It took them three months of ignoring their, "We won't stop until you call us," emails for them to finally stop.