I was looking at a used Panamera the other day. The dealer plopped this 3 page questionnaire in front of me and said we’ll go look at the car after it was filled out. I pushed it away and politely said “no thanks.” (3 pages?? work info, income history, kids ages, married divorced, fuck off) Anyways we looked at the…

IMHO asking for a quote for a new car should be pretty straightforward. Either you want to sell for this price, or not. So if you cannot put that price in writing, in an email or a text message then ... what are you trying to do ? Cheat people ?

For second hand cars, sure, you might want to have some room for…

Im truly not trying to be a jerk here, but I understand that what is an academic discussion to me is to you a livelihood.

Your excuse for having to negotite for car prices is, “its always been like that so deal with it”.

Tom, have you ever had someone pull a bait and switch on models after a settled on price? If so, what’s the deepest the sale has gotten before they fessed up?

Yeah, great, you do. So why are you defending those who don’t?

Even better here’s the reply I want from a dealer:

Your guess would be wrong.

You seem to be going through an awful lot of words to defend a shitty business model. Buyers didn’t create this necessity for back and forth - the dealerships did. Keep defending it all you want, there is absolutely nothing unique to cars that demands this arcane type of bullshit back and forth and shroud of mystery…

This. I’ve ONLY ever bought from the sales people that give me a price over email before I step foot in the dealership. And (for better or worse) I tend to buy a lot of new cars.

And also, I’m not talking a hundred bucks here, I’m talking 500-1000. Less than that but I like you better? Sure. 

For 1), that's. It going to happen every time. You'll have in the lot for longer you'll be more willing to move, or more of one in stock. Unless it does happen every time, and then why should you succeed as a business if someone can do the same thing for cheaper? And yes, I do mean same, I'm not expecting price…

You do realize this is literally, LITERALLY, how we buy anything else, right? If shit’s cheaper on Amazon than at Target then Amazon it is. Walgreens isn’t hiding the price of toothpaste because you might go snitch on them to CVS. 

1) then offer a competitive price

I understand not wanting to contaminate the car, but you’re on the opposite pole of crazy here. There’s not a chance in hell I’d ever agree numbers on something I haven’t driven and nor should anyone else. My contaminating it is easily mitigated: spray it with Lysol when I’m done and air it out for a couple hours.

they don’t need to screw with you over prices when they are bending the insurance company over

Same thing happened to me when trying to buy son a Mazda3 from Subaru of a certain town where the Raiders used to play. The sales person said they only conduct negotiations in person. I told her I was only interested in the out the door price and also if she was aware that there was a pandemic. She replied that they…

“There’s nothing due today; we’ll bill you after we get together with your insurance company and figure out how much we can get away with charging you without it being considered fraud.”

Shitty sales processes exist because they work just often enough to keep them going, at least in some locations and with some dealers. You would think these guys would eventually fail and the market would make them out, but, amazingly many of them are highly successful.

“what’s it gonna take to put you in this car today” BS.