I thinkhe means it’s more along the lines of "I thought you knew these extras were not included in the price…"That’s why for many other consumer areas (i.e. airline tickets) the rules require the TOTAL price to be listed, not the one with the asterisk “plus other charges”. Of course, what you pay to others - your insurance company, the DMV, etc - wouldn’t count in any of these discussions, but aren’t open to negotiation anyway.
Any car ad that I’ve ever seen states clearly along the lines of “$25,995 plus tax and license”. Some people just have blinders on or have a self-fulfilling prophecy of being scammed, I guess.
There is a line item that appears on new car sales contracts around here called “Processing.” This is carspeak for “Pure Profit.” Yes, you do have to pay title, tax, tags. But the dealer sometimes tries to add “junk fees” that are not required by law. They will scream about how it’s standard, it’s preprinted on the contract so they have to charge it, etc., etc. Bullshit.
I bought a Toyota over 10 years ago and wrote a price down on a piece of paper, and under that subtracted their processing fee of something like $300 to show the bottom line price I would pay, before tax and tags (county/state fees), and transportation (which is determined by the manufacturer, IIRC). They didn’t charge me the processing fee.
ETA: BTW, if you think car salesman are sleazy, try buying a house sometime. Mortgage lenders are the kings of the junk fee. And they put you in a position where if you walk away from the table you are making a huge decision.
I read a book on car buying about 20 years ago. I wish I still had it because I forgot who wrote it and I would recommend it to anyone. I still use the tactics that it suggests and also identify the tactics that sales people use on me. Here are some the most memorable.
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The salesman is a professional negotiator. You are probably not. You won’t beat him but with some proper planning you can minimize your cost.
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Never let the salesman use any form of the word “afford”. That is an intimidating word that puts you in defense of your worth. Too many people have paid more just to prove they could afford it. I remind the salesman, “You and I will never discuss what I can afford. I can afford many things. What we will discuss is what I’m willing to pay”
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When the salesman heads for the manager’s office, get up and leave too. Tell him you will be outside sitting in your car. If he takes too long you will leave.
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When a salesman tells me my offer is too low I tell him that price is my expectation. I could be wrong but I will travel to another dealer to try it if he’s not interested. I will either get my price or wear down and raise it. Chances are I won’t be in your dealership when I do finally raise it.
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When the salesman says that I don’t have time to think it over because -“The car you walk away from today to buy tomorrow may be the car that somebody else walked away from yesterday to buy today.” My response,“I bet I can find another seller faster than you can find another buyer”
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Never discuss any price other than the “Out the Door” price. The salesman will try to refer to invoice level pricing. Go ahead and sound like a broken record and ask him if he is stating an out the door price every time he mentions a new price.
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This is the hardest for a lot of people. Never get angry. As long as you are pleasant the salesman will try to work with you and that is your best bet to getting a lower price. When you aren’t getting your way in negotiating use words like “disappointed” and “not meeting my expectations” instead of blocking words like “unfair”, “stupid”, “ridiculous” etc.
Hell, I had a dealer in Anchorage try to tack on a “location” fee of about $600. I asked what the fuck is that and he told me, well, it’s Alaska and these are very popular vehicles. I told him I would rather get on a super-saver flight to Seattle, buy the car there and drive it back, and it would probably cost less than his fee. I refused to even consider it and ended up buying elsewhere.
Items 2 & 3 are dead wrong. There is nothing more embarassing for both buyer and seller than sitting down to fill out paperwork and find out the buyer can’t afford the payments or the down (if there is one). After preliminary talk about what the buyer’s requirements were for a vehicle, the next topic has to be how much per month the buyer is looking to fork out. Otherwise, you’re wasting everyone’s time looking at cars that the guy can’t afford or doesn’t want to make large payments on. It cuts through the bullshit very quickly. If you walk out when the salesman goes to the manager’s office, you’re just going to look like an idiot.
Definitely not true IME. The last time I bought a new car (quite some time ago) a couple of “processing” and “paperwork” fees appeared after we’d agreed on a price. I said “We agreed on $XXX, and now you’re saying you won’t sell the car for that price? Okay, I walk.” And I was definitely ready to. The fees were dropped, and I got the car for the agreed-on amount.
This was transparently a ploy along the lines of “Hey, quite a respectable percentage of buyers can be induced to fork over this extra money, so we might as well try for it every time.”
(I’ve been very happy with my Nissan - a fine, reliable car, and ultimately obtained for a very attractive price - but I have decided never to buy another because of the obnoxious behavior of this dealer.)
Tjose fees can be eaten by the dealership, but they are real fees.
My wife and I went looking for a new-new car a few years ago here in Australia and tried most of the tactics that have been mentioned. And none of the dealers would negotiate at all, even when we had ready finance from the bank and so on.
We repeatedly got told there were no deals, no negotiations, the price on the car was the best we were getting, take it or leave it. We left it and eventually got a near-new second-hand car for considerably less money anyway.
I would disagree with both of these things.
The point about “talking about affordability” is that you’re revealing information that is valuable to the negotiation and you’re also (to some people) being set up for a psychological play on your ego. The cars you as a shopper are looking at should already be based on the amount you believe you are capable of paying there’s no need to reveal this to the other party, however.
And about this “going to see the manager” meme - i think there are two variants of it: there are the times when the salesman truly does need to go see the boss about how low he can sell the car for. and, yes, if you can’t handle that, misread it as a game, and go sit in your car, you look like a dweeb.
then again, there is the “go see the manager” play that is the psychological warfare that some dealerships engage in. and in this case, you aren’t going to look like an idiot, in an objective sense. who gives a shit if the salesman thinks you’re an idiot for not playing his games?
Chefguy:
Just curious, but you worked for Van Tuyl, too. Am I right?
Thats the group that’s got a few stores in AZ, and elsewhere that runs their GMs ragged, no?
You would be amazed at how many people have zero idea about what they either want or can afford, particularly in the RV world. Our inventory had a price range from $8K to $250K. Without knowing what the buyer wbas looking for in terms of both features and price, there was no point in even starting to show models. The only thing “valuable” about the information was that it narrowed the search. If someone came in and was specific about the make and model, then no problem. I figured they had done their homework. But usually, I not only discussed monthly payments but whether or not the person had had a bankruptcy in the past ten years (bankruptcy often equals problems obtaining financing). It’s really a matter of how the discussion is broached and whether or not the salesman has established some level of trust prior to talking about money.
As in 99.9% of the time. So what’s the point?
Again, I can’t imagine anybody doing this. What would be the point of using a tactic that everyone thinks they know about? Are you being fooled? Once the magician’s trick is revealed, do you still say “Ooooh! How did he do that?”
No. I worked for an RV dealer in Alaska. It was brief, but educational. For what it’s worth, I never, ever lied to any customer. People are not stupid, and most have a bullshit meter that clangs like an alarm bell. I was up front about things like financing, monthly payments, mechanical drawbacks, and whether or not I would buy a particular model for myself. It’s probably why I did so well. The sales people nationwide who make $150-$200K every year selling motorhomes don’t do it by pulling cheap sales tactics. They do it by treating their customers well and getting repeat business and referrals. there were a couple of old-time salesman there who would “grind” a customer to try to make a sale. They didn’t do well.
They are real in the sense that they are amounts the dealer wanted to collect for doing certain real tasks. But they are entirely internal to the dealership, and such tasks are a routine part of normal business.
At many retail stores, the checkout clerk must process your order and produce paperwork (a receipt) describing it, but no separate charge is ever made for this.
Its quite a bit different, selling a car or a bar of candy, there’s actuals office work that needs to be payed for, separate from the sales department.
There’s anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour of real work that needs done, and it’s not done for free, by office workers whose job it is to fill out sales paperwork. If you negotiate an absolute, 100% killer deal at invoice (less holdback and incentives) --and you can make this deal, i know, Ive sold them at that–, you can expect to pay these fees, and get booted the fuck out of any dealership I work at if you don’t. You expect me to lose money selling you a car?
There are some dealerships, like one in NC that i won’t name, who charge the state maximum of $599 for Doccumentation fees, the real cost is probably around 40 for this dealership, so the remainder is profit that gets payed the GM and dealer, but not salesmen. If there’s enough profit, and the dealership “eats” that cost, then they’re adding a 2nd pack into the car… Or a 3rd, or a 4th, depending on the dealership.
But it’s important to remember that /most/ dealerships don’t function this way, most charge you the real cost of the documentation. The 1/2 or so hour that it takes their clerks to do the work most of the time.
The unit price is also quite a bit different. If the car requires around 30 minutes of paperwork (as you plausibly suggest) then the overhead as a percentage of the sales price looks to be substantially lower for the car than for the candy bar.
No - I’d settle for a rather basic level of honesty and fair dealing.
And thus follow a practice rarely seen elsewhere. How many other businesses add on a separate charge for paperwork, which they typically try to sneak in after customers believe the final price has been settled?
As i said earlier, back when i sold cars, every single aspect of the price—including dealer costs, taxes, registration, etc.—was included in the contract signed by the customer. There was nothing snuck in after the final price was settled. I think any business that tries to sneak stuff in after the contract has been signed is being dishonest.
But let me also respond to a specific part of your complaint, to wit:
Thing is, buying a car involves a whole bunch of practices rarely seen elsewhere.
Last time you purchased a pair of jeans at Sears, did you take them to the counter and say to the salesperson, “This label says $59.99. How about i give you $52 instead?”
When you bought yourself a new set of kitchen cookware at Crate and Barrel, did you cart your old pots and pans in and ask how much they’d give you for them?
When you bought last week’s groceries at Safeway, did you look up the invoice price of each item on the internet so you could bargain down the profit margin?
None of this excuses actual dishonest behavior, of course; but the fact is that buying a car has become a rather different transaction from most of the ones we undertake in our everyday lives.
You want to know a perfect way to prevent a salesperson from being dishonest with you? Walk onto the lot and say to him, “I’d like to buy that car over there for sticker price.” After recovering from a heart attack, he’ll fall all over himself to treat you better than you’ve ever been treated by a customer service representative before.
As i said before, i dislike the dishonesty and the shady tactics that are so often part of sales, and that’s the main reason i got out after only a year. But it’s a game, and too many customers pretend that the only person playing is the salesperson, when that’s simply not true.
Obviously some dealers are more ethical than the average.
No - and an important part of the reason is that jeans (at least those sold to men) rarely carry a price tag that’s well into “Being willing to pay this much is proof you’re either stunningly naive or certifiably insane” territory. Such pricing is a form of deep dishonesty, since there are occasional naive people who don’t know better and thus pay absurd amounts.
No - nor have I ever done such a thing when buying a car.
Not for groceries, but I certainly do online price checks for a host of other things I buy (e.g. power tools, electronics, cookware).
Agreed. I feel these differences are in too many cases artificial, unnecessary and undesirable.
Well, if Saturn hadn’t gone out of business, you could go and pay sticker price to your heart’s content. The entire reason behind the Saturn way of selling was based upon playing to people who hate to negotiate a price. Now, if you want to see dishonest and misleading practices, take a look at the dealers who sorta-kinda imitate that selling technique. But not really.
Lithia is a very large network of dealers. They move into an area and buy out smaller dealers to try to monopolize the market. When I bought my Chrysler a few years ago, I initially stopped by Lithia to take some trunk measurements on a 300. I noticed that they had a lot of cars on the lot that had “red tag” posters in the windows, and the ad touted that they were taking the guesswork out of buying by posting a “no haggle” price on the vehicles.
I wandered over to one of the cars and was shocked by what they were asking, which was about $100 below MSRP! I collared a salesman and asked him if the signs on the windows meant that those vehicle prices were non-negotiable. He had the balls to tell me that yes, that was so, because if the dealer charged any less, he would be losing money. I smiled and said “well, you’ve lost one customer already.” He apparently had never learned rule number one: never lie to the customer. To me, this is a very nasty and misleading practice that is gaining in popularity. The customer gets a royal shafting and the dealer maximizes profit, and it’s all based on a bright, shining lie.