Even though I hadn't slept much on Monday night (I had woken up at 1:00 am after barely sleeping and then waited outside the dealership from about 2:00 am until just after 7:00 pm on Tuesday), I still had trouble sleeping Tuesday night because Wednesday was deposit day. I was too excited!
None of us knew why they were having us come back the next morning, and that caused me to have a small bit of doubt about my place in line. Because it wasn't official yet. They could have taken our checks when we went to the manager's desk after waiting all day outside. They even wanted to see that we had a check in our possession, but they didn't want to take it then. Why? I didn't know.
I'd gone to the bank and gotten a cashier's check a few days before GM's official ERay reveal on January 17th, so I'd already had the check in my possession for over two weeks. In fact, I tried to give it to one of the Corvette salespeople at MacMulkin right after the reveal, thinking maybe I just didn't get the email notification that they were starting to take deposits, but he wouldn't accept it. What were they waiting for? I didn't know at the time that they were planning The Big Event, which was happening today.
Now the task was to arrive at the dealership first thing in the morning, but since I didn't really know how the day would unfold, I wanted to make sure I didn't drop the ball at this late stage, and I decided that I'd go at least an hour early. The first thing I did when I got there — after turning down an interview with a very pretty TV news reporter — was walk around to the side door where I'd waited for 17 hours the day before. Much to my surprise, the original list was still taped to the window with McDonalds stickers! That's a cool piece of memorabilia, and I'm surprised someone else didn't snatch it up.
Nobody was in line at the side door, and the place looked very quiet, but once I entered through the front, as instructed, I saw that there were lots of people already inside.
They had coffee and pastries for us too.
People were milling around and relaxing while waiting to be called upstairs into the Corvette showroom to hand in our deposits. As the time drew near, many started to gather at the bottom of the stairs, and a TV reporter was there interviewing some of us at the front of the line.
I was glad to see that a MacMulkin employee was at the bottom of the stairs verifying each person's number on their way upstairs because people were crowding around the front of the line like they had done the night before when it got a little chaotic. Once we had gotten inside, they'd given us manila folders with all of our signed paperwork in it, and there was a deli ticket with our number stapled to the front of it. That made it very easy to show our place in line before being allowed to go upstairs.
Walking up to the Corvette showroom felt different this time. I'd traversed that staircase several times before when I went to MacMulkin to see and photograph C8 Corvettes, but this time I was doing it to claim my reward. It felt especially good. When I got to the top of the stairs, I was so excited to give them my deposit that it took me a few seconds to realize that instead of walking directly over to the desks, I was supposed to go all the way down to the end of the showroom and then come back along the other side. Once the line filled in, people could just follow the crowd, but my anxiousness prevented me from seeing the only two people in front of me. MacMulkin had parked half a dozen Z06 Corvettes in the middle, and they had used belt stanchions to create a path around them.
Coming back around the Z06 Corvettes from the far end of the showroom, the path led to a
red carpet just before reaching the desk where they took our deposits. The red carpet was a nice touch!
I exchanged my signed paperwork and bank check for a deposit receipt. Now it was really official, which would be verifiable on their website... I got the #3 spot on their deposit list for a 2024 ERay!
That means I should get one of the first ERay Corvettes produced because MacMulkin is the largest-volume Corvette dealership in the world. The first goal had been achieved, and at that point I figured I'd be in a good position to be able to share an early-production ERay with the rest of the world through this website and a YouTube channel. Please wish me luck!
This was one of the Z06 Corvettes there, and the ERay has the same wide body and trim, so it's a fair representation of what my car will look like, but mine will have different interior/exterior colors and different wheels. I love the ERay wheel options!
I hung around for a bit and chatted with some of the salespeople that I knew from buying my Stingray and from going there to take photos of Corvettes. Everyone was in a jovial mood, as you might expect.
BUT on my way back downstairs, I ran into a friend who had been quite a bit further back in the line, and he gave me some disturbing news about what had happened the night before, after I left. Over the next several days, I researched it online, and I'll talk about that in the next installment of this ERay Deposit Series.
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