No Crying In Car Shopping?

There’s no crying in baseball but there is MUCH crying in new car shopping.

I hate it. It’s not fun unless you have unlimited amounts of money and can afford ANY car you choose.
But I had an agenda. I had a strict budget with no room to negotiate.

This is my first foray into new car buying but I’ve been around others who had done it several times and had been given much advice.
I asked my best friend and her husband to go with me because I figured the presence of a man will keep the vulture-like salesmen from totally ass-raping me.

Apparently, you can’t walk into a car dealership and say “I want a [insert car of choice here] and I want to pay [insert ridiculously low amount here].”
It doesn’t work that way…
The first place we went to had a helpful guy that usually sold Chevy’s but was helping out on the Toyota side.
He knew nothing about the Toyotas but that was ok because I had done my homework. I knew what I wanted, he didn’t have to sell it to me; I just wanted him to give me a good price.
He couldn’t get me into the car I wanted for the price I needed. We found this out after that theatrical song and dance of him taking the paper into his manager, his manager making a higher offer, me declining that and him going back to the manager and finally ending with the big bear leaving his cave to come over and personally tell me that I’m out of my fucking mind.

So we leave that place and head to another. That’s when I test drove another car I really liked.
Our salesman here didn’t have a masterful grasp of the English language but sported an unusually American first name. Kind of like when you call tech support and get a thickly accented Indian named Bob.

We negotiated with the guy for a while, got a price and headed back to the first place, looked at what they had to offer in the way of that car and negotiated for a while. It was suggested to me by my friend that I shop around a little more on Monday but after all of that back and forth, I would have paid anything to never have to do it again.

To make a long story short (I know, too late)…I drove out with a brand spanking new car Saturday night.

It doesn’t sound like a lot of work but take into consideration the back and forth, the mental anguish and nervousness of just spending that kind of money and making that kind of financial commitment and the fact that the heat index this weekend was about 110 degrees.

Of course, you probably know exactly what I went through. Even though gas prices are unfuckingbelievably high, you people are buying brand new cars like they’re going out of style.
There is even a new Hummer dealership opening up down the freeway.
What the hell? I can’t even imagine how much money it would take to fill up a fucking Hummer these days.

I think some people have more money than brains.

Posted by De at August 22, 2005 02:41 PM | TrackBack