As some of you may know, the wife and I have started thinking about getting a dfferent car. I was amazed when I started kicking some tires at the milage and age at some of the vehicles I was looking at. For the kind of money they were asking and the milage to go with it, we were seriously thinking we'd just buy new. I have hated this entire process my whole life and still do, but the good ol' internet has a way of leveling out the playing field.
The Misses and I decided to take a little ride down to the ball field last week Thursday. They were having a big used car sale, so she and I took a ride down. They had a lot of vehicles there, but I would say over half were pick ups and SUVs, and we had no use for these rides. And they had what I consider a lot of junk there. Surface rust, six, seven years old, just general wear and tear. And then there was the creative pricing system. They were offering a straight $3200 off for your trade, then matching $1500 down. To me a bunch of hocus pocus---you need to check the bottom line! Apparently not everyone know this.
They must have had about 25 or 30 sales reps there, all sizes and shapes. The tall and the short, heavy and not, even saw one woman. You were pretty much assigned a guy when you got there, and ours was nice enough to leave us alone when we said we were just looking. There were people looking at some of this stuff, but we didn't see much. The convertables were interesting but not practicle. I couldn't see paying the money they wanted for the milage on most of these things, so we were ready to hit the road. Then we saw a couple of cars we were interested in so we gave our guy a call. We took a ride and talked some more, then made our offer.
They take you into the big tent and it's just like any other car transaction, except here you can hear everyone else's business. There was the older couple who started looking at a Jeep but ended up with a Ford Focus because they told the sales guy how much they could afford, not what kind of car they wanted. There was the guy who had his mom's car for a trade---tough to do when her name is on the title. There was the Hispanic lady who was doing all her calculations on her smart phone (and faster than the sales guy). He didn't like it when she told him she could get a loan for less than 9.5%. And then there was the young couple who looked just out of college. They wanted to look at a Lexius and a Cadillac. The girl looked a little scared, but the guy said not to worry about it, they would figure it out. They must be doing pretty well for a $600 per month car payment.....I looked around and kind of felt sorry for everyone there. I don't think it's that easy of a way to make a living, and some of the people buying these things didn't seem to have a clue.
We ended up getting a Chevy. Told him I didn't have a trade, but I wanted the $3200 off anyways. Of course the sales manager was against this, so I threatened to go to the local junk yard and pick up a $100 clunker----and I told them they'd probably have to tow it back anyways. I told the Misses to be ready to walk bewcause they were going to try and get a couple of hundred more bucks out of us. She didn't believe me, but they did, so we did, and they backed off. Did we get a great deal? Probably not. A good deal? I'd like to think so---you always like to think you do well on these transactions.
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