From The Past: August 24, 2008

Kevin guest blogs about one of our car lot experiences. Before I hand it over to him, let me say this: no matter where we went, a salesman tagged onto us just as soon as our feet hit the ground. This happened everywhere we went except for Saturn. We had a totally different experience there. They weren’t trying to shove a car down our throats. They weren’t pushy in the least. Below, Kevin writes about the most aggressive car lot we visited.

While shopping for a car for Tami, we visited a car lot that just blew our minds. We had previously visited 2 or 3 other lots that day and were getting kind of tired of the “how much can you pay a month” spiel. We already had financing and knew how much we were willing to finance.

Let me see if I can set the scene for you.

Most car lots have the price printed on a piece of paper stuck inside the window. At the very worst, the sales person will tell you the asking price of the car. Not so with this car lot. When we pulled in, they had a huge banner which read, Make Us An Offer.

We turned the truck off and the salesman was greeting us before we could take a breath. He asked what car we might be interested in. We said that we were looking at $XX,XXX or lower. He said, “Just pick something you like and make us an offer.” Tami and I just looked at each other and then asked the salesman which cars were in our price range. He still insisted that we simply pick out a car and he would work to get it for what we wanted.

So we picked a nice looking SUV that we liked, but knew in our hearts would be WAY out of our price range. We made it clear that we could not finance more than $XX,XXX. He said to come inside and he would talk to the sales manager.

Well, we sat there for about 10 minutes and he comes back and says, “How much are you willing to pay a month?” We told him, for the second time, that we already had financing and we didn’t care what kind of monthly payment he could get us. We were only going to pay $XX,XXX for the car.

So he goes back and we wait another 15 minutes and he comes back and says that he could get us financing at a lower rate than we could get and the monthly payment would be something (I can’t remember but it was about $60 more than what the credit union was going to charge). That told me that while they might have been giving me a better rate, the total price was much higher. So we said no thanks we will just leave.

At this point we were kind of feeling annoyed. He kept trying to brow beat us to not be stuck on our credit union but to let them work with us. We said again, no thank you, we are sorry, but we just are not going to agree.

He asked us to hold on for one more minute and went to talk to the sales manager again. After another 20 minutes he came back with the manager. The manager had a printout with the actual price of the SUV… $8,000 MORE than what we wanted to spend! Then he says, “As you can see we have come down as low as we can. We cannot go down as low as you want.”

Tami very calmly (even though we are both very annoyed by now) tells him this is why we asked for the price in the first place. We would have never looked at a car that was that expensive. She then goes on to tell him that people want to know the price of the car up front and not have to play this game and waste time finding out you are looking at a car you cannot afford.

We tell them, “Thanks for your time” and we get ready to leave. He keeps trying to ask what they can do to get us in this car. He starts being very pushy and keeps talking. We finally just say no thanks and stand up. The sales guy follows us out the door and said he was sorry he could not get something worked out but (and this is pretty bold) says, “Maybe I can show you a car closer to your price range.”

The nerve of that guy! If he had done that in the first place, or just told us that they did not have anything in our price range we would have been fine. Instead we left there very ticked off; feeling as if we had fought 10 rounds and barely got out alive. I will never go to that lot again, nor would I recommend it to anyone. I told one guy as we were leaving to watch out and to escape while he could.

For those people in the area, the lot is out Nicholasville Road and they have “Make Us An Offer” signs all over.

It was truly a horrible experience. When we left I was just sure someone would run after our truck yelling for us to come back and make them an offer!