For years, as noted in parts of this thread, GM believed (!!!!!!!!) that the dealer and the customer were right, the end.
You want a special color on your car? No problem. You pick it out, and if it is in the GM system, we'll order it, and if you can wait a while, we'll paint it.
This was done of necessity for fleet and municipal use, but about an hour after someone saw their first black and white cop car, the light went off in their head... "aha!" and then you could get it in any color you wanted.
It was not widely advertised, because it was a major PITA at the plant level (Keith Seymore, jump in here). The guns in the body shop were equipped to shoot all the standard colors, so a painter could squirt aqua, black, red, whatever without breaking stride. Doubling the complexity was the fact that Fisher was a separate operation and separate building for all intents and purposes from rest of the assembly operation. Fisher did the cab, the marketing division did the front clip, and even though great pains were taken to ensure a dead match, in reality, there was an almost constant war between the two over who was responsible when they didn't match.
The body shop in the plant would have to buy a couple gallons of the paint, mix it up, and then have a painter follow the darn thing around with his pressure tank and gun through the paint operations. And if the paint got rejected, it went into a repair hole until enough MORE could be located to finish the job after a thorough sanding and wash down.
There are some cool colors like the Chevy Aztec Copper, the Plum Mist and several of the Cadillac Firemist / Firefrost colors (such as the silver used on the Swiss Cheese Catalinas) that look great on our Pontiacs that were special order, or not widely available.
I suspect "XXX" color codes would only be used on sold retail orders from a customer; can't conceive of a dealer spending the money unless it was going to be parked in the showroom for a while.
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