About 2 months ago, my youngest daughter got t-boned totalling her car. She needs a replacement. We go to local dealer to look at a nice low mileage offering they had on the lot. Needless to say we did our homework and knew bluebook values and such. To make a long story short, after me letting the salesman get his daily exercise running back and forth to his boss with dumbass offers, we finally settled on a price.
Now. They won't let you use off premises financing(damn near a deal breaker for me) so hear we go with a whole new exercise in stupidity. First round of papers weren't jiving on her payments. I'm trying to decipher this crap and I finally see they are hitting us w 10.5% financing. I told the youngster, run back to your boss and bring my a copy of the credit report you ran on me please sir. He has that deer in the head light look but does as he's told. As I expected it was a little over 800. I look him in the eye , hand him the credit report back as well as the paperwork they brought for me to sign and told him, I'm sure this was an honest mistake. Tell your folks to fix it or I'm gone.
Round 2 financing. They bring this all back and had a huge paper flag pointing at new interest rate. I think it was around 3% or so. Uh huh. Well, payment still doesn't jive. So....I dig in again reading this crap. Wow. Here's a line item for $1800.00 that wasn't there before. What might this be young man? Oh. Well that's an on board GPS system they put on that model of car now. I stood up and shook his hand and said thanks for his effort and start out. My poor daughter is loosing her chit because she doesn't understand anything except daddy blew a gasket and we are leaving. The young man is wigging out over his lost sale and trying to justify "having" to charge for the GPS. I stop walking and firmly asked : That car has four tires and wheels. Is there going to be a line item charge for them also. Yall named the damn price. Honor it or keep it. Showroom got real quiet. (Well maybe I was a little too loud).
Did you know when they try, they can draw papers up and have you on the way in about 10 minutes? I guess they were tired of my company. Oh...and we got all the pricing, interest and such corrected. And they threw in GPS!
I'm spoiled. I call my Ford guy. Tell him what I want. He calls me when it's in and usually delivers. Their store is 60 miles away no less. He told me he stays oversold. Selling philosophy...walkins buy at sticker price w no other markups. They can't keep up. Fleet guys like me, they rub their crystal ball and always give us exceptional price.
Car buying is a strange world. Leave your moral compass at the door when you go to work I guess. That's what will be the demise of dealerships as we know them.
Sorry for being long winded.
