re: Somebody's got to rethink the car dealership model

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I had one dealership sell a car out from under me after we agreed on a price.

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Gross!

Admittedly, I usually make fun of the guys who tell their cool stories on here about how they told off this person or whatever, but i'll be a bit hypocritical and tell mine:

I buy a Jeep about 10 years ago, there wasn't much haggle. I had my price picked on the one I wanted. Test drove, gave my asking price but told them I had to leave and they could call me back if they can meet it. They do and meet it, so I come back and buy it, all good.

About 3 weeks later, I get a call from the Finance guy saying he needed me to come in to sign something in the contract that was overlooked. I thought about asking them to fax it over so i didn't have to drive there, but I immediately thought it was fishy, so I kinda wanted to do it in person. So I showed up with the copy of my original contract. They tell me about the mistake but were super vague and giving me the finance lingo so i didn't really know what they were talking about.

So they present to me an entire new contract where my monthly payment was $40 more(I can't recall how much the total price changed off hand.) I kinda laughed and said I'm not signing this as we already agreed on pricing. They told me the contract wasn't binding until after 30 days so if I don' sign it, then we could "possibly" not even have a legal, binding contract(to this day I don't even know if that's true or just a ploy from them.) So I asked the Finance Manager if I could make a quick phone call, he says ok. So I stay in his office so he could hear, call my girlfriend on my cell and tell her to come pick me up because I'm leaving my new car at the dealership because we no longer have a contract.

The Finance dude did a 180 so quick and all of a sudden I didn't need to resign anything, and everything was perfectly fine. I really, really wanted to actually leave the car there and be done with it. But to be honest, the car was pretty perfect for my liking at the time and at a good price, so while it woulda been great to prove a point to them, I didn't want to deal with the hassle of starting over, so I just stuck with it.

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Give the sales guys a bottom line price for each vehicle on the lot before they enter the room with the customer. Let them negotiate within that range with the understanding the higher the price, the better the commission.

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Wait, that's not exactly how it's done nowadays?

It's not.

Someone on reddit r/personalfinance had the same shite pulled . Except they went all the way and repossessed the car out of his driveway.

Didn't end well for the dealers.

I can't imagine a better process for buying cars than we have, w unlimited options and an ease of price comparisons on the webz

I'd rather take a hammer to my dick than deal w an apple store

Japan.

Door to door service.

They bring car to your house