I don’t know how it is for all of you, but buying a car is a challenging, stressful, and time consuming process. My wife and I needed to consolidate 2 cars into one this weekend and went through this process for 5-6 hours with multiple offers and visits to the dealership.
We knew that we wanted to stay with Nissan, so we shopped with a local dealership. We went into the dealership and test drove the car that we wanted, a Maxima, and then came back to sit down to go over the “numbers”. Our salesman was a nice enough guy, but I feel like all of these guys, at least at this dealership were pretty pushy saying things like “when was the last time you bought a car” and… “you should buy what you want” and my personal favorite …. “you are going to have to sit down to hear this offer because you are going to pass out”. Unfortunately, they did not know who they where dealing with and that kind of stuff is not impressing or believable to us. They also seem to start at a ridiculously high monthly payment and tried to push us into long term loan (more interest for them). In the end we ended up going back and forth on the value of our trade ins for an hour (of which they told us that our cars where much less valuable than the Kelly Blue Book trade-in value) then we spent an hour going over what the actual cost of the car to us would be. Finally, we couldn’t agree so we left the dealership; as we were driving away we got a call letting us know about the new lifetime Power-train warranty, making it very obvious to us that us walking away was very painful for them. We then called another local dealership and got them to beat the deal at the original dealer. We called the original dealer back and they agreed to match this deal and so it was done…. a long 6 hour process. It was also amazing that the tone of the car salesman was very different in the initial stages versus the selling stages. His over excited personally was what greeted us when we first arrived to look at the car. By the time we were done, he did not seem so happy. Hopefully that was because we got too good of a deal!
All of this got me thinking that this is one of the last places left in the United States where you are bartering and negotiating directly with the seller of an item and it is truly adversarial in nature. The dealer wanting to make the most amount of money and the buyer wanting to get the best deal possible. In our case, I think that we ended up meeting in the middle and all seemed to work out okay!
This is all much more difficult that finding new and exciting dog treats for our business!
