OT-- forward-looking Star-Spangled ed. -- June 29

Unfortunately, existing dealer franchise relationships mean that day is a ways off.

I didn’t really have a bad experience buying my Kia, but there were very sneaky tactics they used to drive up the price in ways a lot of young people might not notice, or just overlook.

I went home to sleep on their final offer, and came back the next day saying “I’ll accept that offer you gave me, let’s talk” and they pulled up all our paperwork…..with an extra year tacked on the offer. Same monthly payment, extra year = something like $4,000 more than we agreed on, but it wasn’t clearly laid out. When I said I wanted 5 years they said “Oh, oh no. No we’d lose money, we never would have offered that.”

Which was totally bullshit, but at that point my wife and I had our hearts set on the car so we haggled a bit more, and ended up accepting an offer like $2,500 more than we expected when we came in that day.

Let’s go into business together. wink wink

Aside from the objections that Toot raises, it’d be really hard to make much money at it when your goal is to save each customer something like $200-$1,000. To make it at all worthwhile for the customers, you wouldn’t be able to charge much, and to live on that wage you’d have to work through a lot of cars.

I love helping people find happiness in their cars and so I enjoy helping friends buy cars (particularly used cars – I’d be perfectly content browsing Craigslist all day) but I can’t see going beyond that. But hey, since we’re all one big community here, I’m happy to lend at least some degree of help to fellow LLers if I can. Toot may be more qualified, though, as a former salesman.

Car Woo.

I haven’t used it but from what I’ve read of it it sounds like what you’re describing.

The hardest part is picking out the car you want to buy. You can’t pay somebody else to pick it for you. Seriously, the easiest part of the whole process is pricing and yet that is the only thing a broker will do for you. Is that worth the extra few hundred bucks? An extra $300 of purchase price is roughly $7/mo over a 60 month loan. It’s outrageous to pay somebody to say “give me the best price” and then add money to that price to pass on to you

Fire trucks, because if you sell one you’re fired

Didn’t like it much from a dealer perspective, but it’s fine for customers. From the sales end of things, you pay money to Costco and they then refer customers to you. You have to give them a “better deal” than a “normal” customer would get and they enforce it enough that they can kick you off the program for giving a better deal to somebody else.

But, it was an easy deal because somebody would ask for a Costco deal and we’d make it something like 3% over invoice and make deals all day long because they wouldn’t haggle, even though we would be happy to make an even better deal if the customer wanted.

If anybody can’t tell by now, I’m not a fan of people trying to “shortcut” the process of negotiating. These days, any interaction with the dealership that does not involve you walking in there is routed through the internet sales department, and they are the ones that give a great deal right away because they understand that it’s a competition just to get the customer in the door. Just send an email to the internet sales department and see how easy it is