I have spent the last few weeks trying to sell my car and buy a one, and I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that the way we buy and sell cars in this country is quite insane.
When I go to the meat department of the grocery store, the steaks I’d like to buy for dinner and clearly marked with a price. If I can afford the price, I buy the steaks and I have a delicious dinner. If I can’t afford it, I pick up a pound of ground beef and a box of Hamburger Helper and I have an adequate, if not delicious dinner.
It’s the same way when I buy underdrawers at the department store or a TV at the electronics store or a collar for Milly, the liver and white springer spaniel who lives at my house, at the pet store.
Cars do have a price tag on them. But no way actually pays that amount. In fact, the amount you end up paying can be thousands of dollars less than the sticker price, depending on how willing you are to play the game the car salesmen like play.
As soon as you walk onto a car lot, a salesman descends on you. You tell him the car you want, the color you want and the options you’d like to have. He shows it to you. You take it for a test drive. And then the fun begins.
The salesman takes you over to his cubicle and tell you a price.
“This is the best I can do,” he’ll say.
You tell him it’s more than you want to pay.
“Let me talk to my sales manager and see what I can do.” Then he leaves, under the guise of talking to his sales manager, but I always envision him in the back with the other salesmen talking about the Falcons opener.
I’ve always wondered why they call them “salesmen” since they clearly aren’t empowered to determine how much to sell the car for. Why don’t you let me go talk to the sales manager?
Anyway, this song-and-dance goes on for a little while until finally you agree on a price you are willing to pay. But you still have this nagging feeling that you could have negotiated an addition $500 off the sales price.
What if we applied this kind of negotiating to every other purchase we make?
You’re at the meat counter. You see a nice T-bone steak. It’s marked $8.99 a pound.
“Excuse me,” you say to the butcher. “There’s quite a bit of fat right here on this steak. I’ll give you $7.49 a pound”
Or you’ve found a nice golf shirt at the department store. It’s marked $35.99, which you think is a pretty good price. But it’s sort of a burgundy red, and you really wanted a fire-engine red, which they don’t have in the store.
“You know, this is nice,” you say to the clerk. “But it’s not really what I was looking for. You don’t have the color I had my heart set on. How about I give you
29 bucks cash right now and we make this deal happen?”
We could probably all save a lot of money this way. Of course, it would take you five and a half hours to buy groceries if you haggled over the price of everything in your cart.
So how about we compromise and find a better way to sell a car?
