Their Biggest Lies
Let’s face it, life is a sales game.
Companies and people make money by touting their product as being better than the competition’s, whether or not it’s actually true. So why do car salesmen have such bad reputations? Probably because for most people, a car is their biggest single purchase other than a home. Combined with negotiable prices and lots of options to sort through, customers take trickery very seriously. It’s this group that tends to bring down the industry’s reputation, spoiling the broth for the honest salespeople. They’re not necessarily any more prevalent at auto dealerships than at a Wall Street brokerage firms or anywhere else. But again, car buyers making that once-in-five-years big purchase tend to notice them more. And there’s no SEC or Nasdaq looking over their shoulder. Why do dealership owners keep them on? They typically sit atop the sales charts — that’s why.
Where They Get You Among the most egregious is an old scam called “price packing,” in which a salesman agrees with a customer on a price for a car, then “packs” hundreds of dollars extra onto the final bill by claiming finance charges add up to a few more dollars per month than they actually do. Another bill-padder is excessive labor fees for pre-delivery work like audio system upgrades or larger wheels, also easy to disguise by adding just a handful of dollars a month to the final finance charge. To create a sense of urgency, tell the customer he won’t get the same price after the first of the month (that’s sometimes true, but more often it’s not). To lure prospective buyers to the showroom, put deceptive ads in the local paper that headline big price reductions which suddenly become false upon arrival.
So why can’t buying a car be more straight forward and haggle-free, where the price on the sticker is final? Because we, as a society, don’t want that. General Motors’ Saturn unit tried that approach a decade or so ago, and it flopped. The public has shown it likes to do battle with the car salesmen figuring they have a chance of winning. Although, there is a car priced search engine, due to launch within a few months, with figures allowing consumers to arm themselves before confronting car salesmen.
