I’m saying a lot of the vitriol against dealers stems from underhanded business practices. They happen on both sides of the table (my car is perfect and never driven except on Sundays…and the A/C blows cold) and (Sir, we have to charge you $75 for floormats)
The people here who could give two shits about someone losing their job feel that way because of one or more crappy experiences in dealing with stereotypical Car Sales experiences.
You can recognize that something needs to happen, and also feel sympathy for the suffering that that necessary event causes to some people. Events don’t have to be either good or bad, with nothing good coming from a bad event and nothing bad coming from a good one. There are a lot of shades of gray in between.
I have a hard time mustering sympathy for car dealers. Mainly because every time I go to a dealer I feel as though someone is trying to screw me over.
Odesio
I feel that way about strip clubs, too, but I’d feel bad for out-of-work strippers.
If you’re looking at items like floormats & such, you don’t know how to buy a car. Find the car with the options you want, then find out how much people are paying over invoice for said car. Then find the invoice for said car online. Pretty easy.
Pretty easy, but also pretty f*cking unnecessary.
And by this point, were not even talking about back-end compensation. (The dealership sells the car for X…at the end of the year, the manufacturer pays the dealership AGAIN based on the number of cars sold.)
So, the price of the car is:
The MSRP, minus the trade, minus the negotiated price difference, plus added fluff, plus the interest kick back if you use the dealer’s choice financial backer, minus the end of year kickback. If you lease, there’s also a calculation for residual value, mileage overages, unexpected wear, etc.
There are so many places to pad the profit that they don’t care if you ‘rape them on the trade-in’, they’ll just get you somewhere else.
The price paid for a 2009 1500 Chevy Pickup with the LT2 option shouldn’t have a ‘Suggested Retail Price’, it should have a price. Period. Finding out what ‘other’ people are paying is setting the price by bell curve. Paying a stupid tax to be the first person on the block to own one is predatory. Being able to DOUBLE the price on a car by adding options because it only ads $50 a month to the lease is predatory.
Dealerships have gotten RICH because they can snow you over. It’s not simple to buy a car, it’s not easy to look it up on the internet, it’s just a painless way to separate you from your money if you’re not abnormally observant.
Yeah, yeah, caveat emptor but it shouldn’t oughta be that way.
And in 36 months, you’ll do it again because you’re bored with your car.
ETA: Deets on that ‘invoice price’ of yours: Invoice price: What's it really worth? - Jul. 22, 2004
And then:
We did this when my gf last bought a car - called/emailed a number of dealers, said exactly what we want how much we wanted to pay. Salesman calls, said he would agree to the deal, we go down and everything appears great.
And then we go into the finance manager to sign final forms.
Without even saying anything, he simply hands us a contract to sign with a different total price. I ask what the difference is. He tells me sales tax. Its till too high, I’ve calculated that. Oh, well there is an advertising fee and window etching and floorplan fee and yes - floormats. Everyone pays that, don’t you know. No way around it. I argured for 20 minutes, his boss came in and we argued for 20 minutes. Just before we got up and walked out they took those costs off.
The dealer doesn’t want to look like an asshole? How about being up front about the real cost of the car. Instead of agreeing to 20,000 and then trying to sneak and lie another 700 on top in the finance office, just tell me you can do the deal at 20,700. Then we negotiate from there.
Necessity has nothing to do with it. Most dealers are simply unwilling to take thousands of dollars off the table to begin with. It’s the same with homeowners. Don’t undercut yourself.
Not if you have any brains.
Nonsense. Nobody is forcing you to be an early adopter. Nobody bitches when electronics manufacturers charge more early in a product’s life.
So rich that they’re closing down… how many is it?
Yes, it is.
Short attention span seems to be a theme with you.
Doesn’t really matter. It still provides teh buyer with the minimum amount the car dealer will take.
Next time negotiate the Out The Door price.
If you want to talk about dealers who are blatantly dishonest, that’s another issue. They aren’t all that way, despite what some people think. I’ve had bad experiences in BestBuy more than I have at a car dealership.
Y’all can feel sympathy for me then, because I am getting burned by it. I bought (or thought I bought) a Dodge before the bankruptcy. I got the VIN and everything. Unfortunately, it hadn’t made it onto the assembly line before the shutdown that accompanied the bankruptcy. No problem, it will just come a couple of months late, I am told. So I try to milk that out of my 9 year old Hyundai, that has seen (many) better days.
Anyhow, now it turns out that my dealership is closing. That can be survived. The bankruptcy also took out Chrysler Financial, so while I can still get the car, my financing deal is shot to shit. No more 0% financing for me. Fortunately I did not put a lot down. I am looking at alternatives, but I am totally in love with the car and there really isn’t anything comparable out there.
That is exactly what I did - we sent them detailed sheets of exactly how we arrived at our offer and wrote right on it, and said it outloud “Out the Door” They agreed. Then started tacking on costs as mentioned above.
This was Nissan. Same thing happened when my parents bought a vw and thier Nissan before that. My first VW purchase wasn’t too bad - but they did try to tell me that the 1% financing all over VW’s website at the time didnt’ exist until I made the Finance person literally open the website while I sat there. Before that she started with “Congratulation!!! Since your credit is so good we can offer you a rate of 5.5%!!!”
Its easy to say, “do your research and make an offer” but that doesn’t mean you won’t have to sit there for an hour arguing with the dealer also, or walking out of place after place.
Let me sum up your response to me:
Listen, I know all of the stuff you’re saying, you’re not teaching me anything new (my evidence should show I’m aware of it.)
My point is: you shouldn’t need to be a Lawyer or Internet Savant to buy a car. Currently, to negotiate the ‘best price’, you do. That assumes you really DO get the ‘Best Price’ and not ‘The Best Price I Can Pay and I thought I beat them up enough’. Because that really isn’t the best price either.
By looking at the responses here, there seem to be a lot more people agreeing with me than you.
There is a well engineered disconnect between what a car costs (Manufacturing, design, sales, distribution, etc.), and what it sells for. That is all.
My last car was purchased at Honda, and my price was exactly as negotiated. I made it clear that I would leave the dealership if the price at the bottom of the contract was anything other than what we had agreed upon. Actually, I don’t think I even got that big and bad on them, but I wouldn’t have hesitated to walk.
It’s interesting that your bad experiences have been at foreign dealerships when many people in this thread seem to think that the domestic dealers are the primary culprits.
What proof?
The “not if you have any brains” wasn’t directed at you at all. It was directed at the hypothetical car buyer. I’m not sure why you’re so sensitive about this all of a sudden.
You don’t have to be. I’m not sure why you think so. I’m neither.
Do I need to point out this particular logical fallacy?
The fact is, nobody has ever unwilling bought a car. Nobody has a gun to anyone’s head. If you’re willing to pay $10,000 for a Toyota, you have not been screwed simply because the dealer would have taken $9600. Neither has the dealer been screwed because you would have paid $10400.
Just as an aside, I don’t get the comparison to buying a home as another negotiated deal -
Most houses are used and rarely are any 2 exactly alike, so setting a fixed price is impossible - you have to have a negotiation between buyer and seller.
When you and a seller agree to a price and go to closing, the seller doesn’t then tell you that the price he agreed to didn’t include his moving costs, costs for cleaning and painting it, there is a $50 fee if you want the key to the front door, etc.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
There are many things about the automotive industry that are emotional in nature and don’t stand up to investigation. Another is that American cars are crapboxes and foreign cars are superior. A modern car manufacturer could not stay in business if they really created bad products. Just because I grew up in a Chevy Family and won’t buy anything but Chevy doesn’t mean Chrysler makes a bad car.(*) But you’ll find someone who thinks Chevy’s are shit and others that feel the same way about Chryslers (and yet a third who hates Honda…and a fourth that hates BMW)
*= an example. Replace Chevy and Chrysler with Mercedes and MagnaBigMotors of you want.
I understand that different dealers offer different experiences. However the tricks and deception I and others talk about are not rare at all. Therefore the entrie car selling industry is set up to attemp to take advantage of unsuspecting buyers. Sure you can do research and be tough and firm, but the point is that you shouldn’t have to “be ready to walk out when they try to screw you over”
Other industries have negotiated sales (homes, large electronics, etc) but do not have the muliple methods of purposely fooling the buyer.
That is what is annoying to me.
Have you ever heard of closing costs? They may not hit you with it at the table (though it happens a lot), but there are still hidden costs sprung on people all the time. There are dozens of bits of minutiae negotiated in the purchase of a house after a price has been initially agreed upon. As a builder, I’m on more solid ground here.
Regardless, I’m not defending the bait and switch tactics employed by the car dealer you had experience with (or others, for that matter). I just don’t have a problem with car dealers who are willing to haggle on price.
What are you talking about? I never said it was. I was pointing out that there are good dealers out there.
Agree.
You should be ready to walk away from any deal, whether it be a car or a haircut.