Recently I bought a Toyota SUV for a $7000 markup. But I was able to sell my lease (which I had no idea was even possible) for $5000.
Now, dealership laws in many states forbid the automaker from selling their cars directly to the consumer if they already have a dealership in the state, with their only recourse being that the automaker can say "you can't mark this car above MSRP", with varying levels of success.
I just thought the headline was a bit much. Although maybe I was thinking of the article's headline, not your headline here on HN. I want to say they were the same when I posted my comment, but I'm not sure.
It's hyperbolic, but yeah self-interest is a pretty good approximation for behavior of all living organisms. Powerful natural forces like self-interest should be utilized to produce a good outcome, but they don't guarantee a good outcome just by being powerful. Jealousy and hate are powerful forces too.
For capitalism to work, many supporting structures are required. One is information symmetry. If you have to drive 10h and speak with a sales rep for 1h before you learn the price, you don't have a free market. Aside from this being deceitful and false advertising, it introduces economic inefficiencies in the most basic sense. All efforts that bring transparency are to be saluted.
In that sense it is no different than airline ticket fees (though not baggage fees) and similar schemes. The goal is to stop customers from doing apples-to-apples comparisons when shopping.
Is a dealership wanting to sell for the highest price any different than a labor seller wanting to sell for the highest salary?
Dealers link these two needs together and take a cut for the service. There is no monopoly or requirement to sell a car through a dealer. It’s just that people find the service worth the cost.
I've heard of plenty of cases (so yeah, anecdata) where a dealer might advertise the car at MSRP, but it's not until you get in there, and actually try to buy it that they reveal they won't actually sell it for MSRP - there's "market adjustments", and mandatory addons and other things.
Again, based on anecdata, They really have.
I heard of one person who confirmed a price with a dealer, drove there, then suddenly Salesmanager Bob (who confirmed the price) is suddenly unavailable, and the other sales managers couldn't possibly honour that because there's all these other fees, charges, mandatory addons for it.
Their attitude is basically if you want it, and you've spent this much time already trying to buy it - what's another couple of thousand to you.
This is false. In most states, direct sales are illegal.
Dealers have a legislatively enforced [1] monopoly on new car sales.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dealerships_in_the_United_...
This is incorrect. It's required, by law, in most states:
> In the United States, direct manufacturer auto sales are prohibited in almost every state by franchise laws requiring that new cars be sold only by dealers.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dealerships_in_the_United_...
However, they play those games where they advertise one price but actually have tons of mandated fees when you show up to purchase. So it makes shopping around very hard, you can’t compare between 2 dealerships as even calling them won’t give you that info. It’s predatory and anti consumer.
Advertised price was 24,500. I walked out totaling 30,000 after all the bullshit and that was with a 4000 downpayment. I left an honest review on Google Reviews about how misleading and unhappy I was with that dealer in particulars process but I loved the car so I just sucked it up.
When we bought my wifes car I had a much better experience. Some dealerships are just sleazy, and if you need the car you need the car.
I had a similar experience booking a hotel room recently. Despite advertising a rate of $x, when I'd click through to complete the booking, towards the end of the process every single one would tack on a mandatory "service fee" of somewhere between $40-80. It seems to me to be a way to keep their room rates artificially lower to stay competitive on the price comparison websites.
(Maybe this has been a thing for a while - I haven't booked a hotel in years)
Isn't that illegal? They are advertising for non-existent product.
Ford seems to be testing the waters about how to simplify the car purchase process: https://fordauthority.com/2022/05/ford-dealers-will-likely-s...
There's plenty of dealerships who have historically had simple purchase processes with standard no haggle pricing but often buyers have to do extensive research in order to find such dealerships.
The current "markup" phenomenon is the same as the prior experience (pre-pandemic) where OEMs intentionally subsidized the purchase of their vehicles well below MSRP, and savvy customers could negotiate thousands off a car deal. It's mind boggling to me that we allow for such an inefficient market to perpetuate! 100 years of franchise dealerships is enough! Time for business and consumers to wake up and enact change.
Even with all of the might of GM behind it, and with the cars themselves having a distinct position in the market with a few unusual features no other brand had, such as polymer body panels that were lightweight, rust proof and easy to repair (by simply replacing entirely), Saturn only lasted a few years before folding.
I was selling cars myself for a few months during their peak, and recall that they mainly got used as a rhetorical backstop by customers who would bring in an invoice for our vehicle (printed out from edmunds.com, which had just barely become a thing at the time), and argued that they should pay some absurdly small fixed number ($100, $300, possibly $1000 if they were buying an NSX, our "halo" vehicle) over invoice to get a fixed price like saturn.
This was a couple years before dealerships had organically responded to the internet by adding all sorts of hidden costs that do not show up on an invoice to the base price (in addition to the usual ones) so unlike today the invoice was literally our invoice price. But they were not there to buy a Saturn they were there to buy a different brand of car.
The pattern seems to be: if you create value, you get optimized away. If you buy, screw things up to create scarcity, and flip, you make bank.
I usually do the same when I sell stuff second-hand because my priority is getting rid of it as fast as possible, not to make the most money. Since dealers have very limited inventories these days, they should take more time to get a better price.
Similarly, I also love that this website exists as a consumer, to provide balance to the market and better distribute demand (keeping prices overall lower).
So much is "wrong" with the dealership model relative to a competitive market I don't even know where to start. But, I do believe over time the franchise laws and dealer cartels will change dramatically. We're seeing that start to happen now with Tesla's model and Ford is creating a new model that looks a lot like Tesla's. Some states, looking at you TX, will continue to protect the local dealers cause the dealer associations donate a lot of money to state politicians but the tide will eventually turn...at least I think it will.
American society is structured such that a car is considered more or less a requirement. Is it okay to charge the max people will possibly pay for other requirements of living like medicine? Martin Shkreli Was universally loathed for that.
Dealers aren’t supposed to charge extreme markups any more Than they are supposed to give cars away for free. They do it because right now they can, but that doesn’t make it moral or American. It is just greed, which is often waived off as “how capitalism is supposed to work”. It’s just greedy usury because they can get away with it.
The other issue is the classic bait and switch they do. They’ll market one price online but once you’re in person suddenly that price is marked up 15k.
The solution? Remove dealers from the equation and let the manufacturers sell directly.
If you think that the process of buying a car at retail is the market working efficiently, your expectations are incredibly low.
I don't think the process of buying a new car is efficient at all. And I'm not defending the dealership system either. I'm just saying they're acting rationally, and that the markups don't shock me.
Just like the market can react to markups, it can also do so for markdowns.
Maybe those who were too late will come back and be quicker to decide next time, because they think you are fair.
If you make it all about who has more money, they'll go to another dealer.
There's no shortage of them.
Imagine if any store did that: you go to an Apple store to buy a new iPhone, there are 20 people in front of you. Are you ready to outspend some of them?
Sell to first buyer, easy.
Then it’s bullshit that will lead to violence.
How do you account for dealers which sell for $0 above MSRP but then include a non-negotiable $700 "paint protection" service?
As a crowdsourced site, you'll get a ton of reports that a particular dealership has no markup and few if any reports from people who have actually been far enough into the purchase process to discover these hidden markups.
On Saturday, my friend traded in his 2017 GMC Canyon with 86k miles on it for $19k.
He had paid $25k for it new in 2017. The dealership now has it listed for used sale for $28,995.
If they're turning a $10k profit on a 5yo car driven pretty hard for 5 years and selling it above what it cost when it was new, I have no doubt they're marking up the new ones even higher!
Sure, I expect I could get that private-party. But on trade-in??
I'm not exactly sure how these things work, but if the manufacturer is forbidden from selling direct and dodging the dealer, that's a problem. If the manufacturer could, but is choosing not to, well, that's on them - They are simply transferring the PR hit to the dealer (and giving up the profits, which sounds dubious)
Pretty good example of trading one thing for another though! Pay up now for a car now, or wait and save your money for a car that isn't marked up. It's kind of funny seeing corporations try to apply price controls, rather than the government :)
The reason car dealers are so powerful is because they influence so many aspects of local government.
Ford CEO Had Enough: Dealers Raising Prices Need to Stop or Else [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32318698 - Aug 2022 (128 comments)
Specifically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319225
If you are an expert haggler you can likely negotiate a better price than what you get through Costco, but for the rest of us it gets you 90% of the way for very little effort.
I hope that when I purchase my next car, I'll never have to deal with dealerships and can buy it off online. I'm happy to pay 6-10% commission for dealership as long as I don't have to deal with haggling and being pushed to buy shady insurance and other add-ons that I don't need.
Once I had the final price on the car, and it was very comfortable to me, they STILL tried to get me to sign a 'contract' using the four-square numbers. Just monthly payment amounts, no length or other information.
They literally wouldn't move forward until I signed it. Like, wouldn't let me see the manager to finish the deal. The price was so good on this one, though, that I didn't want to just walk out.
So I took a black sharpie and crossed everything out, wrote the total price, and signed it at the bottom.
It wasn't a legal document. It was literally just a sheet with their handwriting on it saying "monthly price agreement". Nothing finance related, no legal jargon anywhere.
Ridiculous. Just absolutely ridiculous, and for what purpose?
Wife is looking for a Chevy Bolt after her car was scraped in an accident (the other person's fault).
Every dealership other than a single local one is charging between $5K and $10K "market adjustment".
I'm sure many of these are just charging the markup no matter what. But I have a theory many charge this if you're from out of town and won't be paying them later for maintenance services. This the local dealership that seems to be the odd one out not charging this.
How do they know you're from out of town when they give you the quote? Do they refuse to quote without a valid and verified address?
After all, can't you just give them a local address when asking for the quote?
I got pretty decent at car buying from dealerships over the years, and I kind of feel like a sucker for playing that game now.
Again: I'm sure you're right that buying a Tesla from Carmax is a terrible idea.
I doubt losing my business will cause anyone willing to price gouge to change their practices, but who knows what other evil things that kind of company will do to exploit you so I'll feel even better supporting a business that didn't go out of their way to take advantage of people who are struggling.
I suspect that Markups will remain relevant for as long as the situation vis-à-vis car dealerships and how they operate persists in the US. Markups may even prove to be instrumental in successfully rallying and focusing consumer support sufficiently to overcome the status quo, and so eventually have no further reason to exist. But the word "eventually" in the previous sentence is key.
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/lobbying.php?ind=T230...
Great concept, garbage execution.
Some ideas just work better on a big screen, mouse and keyboard. We shouldn't limit ourselves just to make everything work on an iPhone.
This sentiment has become equivalent to "is it really necessary for everyone to access this?" Buying an entire desktop computer for home use just to cover the fringe cases is now a luxury.
(Not to mention the two primary use cases are reporting and viewing prices on your phone when you are at a dealership)
That doesn't preclude criticism, however. Might want to check out current stats for mobile browsing. I've been in web development for 20 years and the numbers continue to go up. So again; no, but you're excluding a lot of traffic, and users. And for a site relying on crowdsourced data, that seems like a poor choice.
I don't see anything this site would have to "limit itself" by to support mobile.
https://sunrise-ford.com/inventory/new-2022-ford-f-150-light...
F150 owners treat their trucks like gamers treat their RGB desktops. Does the watercooling and lighting package really improve performance? Not really. Do nerds still spend lots of money on them? Absolutely. Putting a lift-kit on the pickup truck that drives exclusively on paved roads is similar.
It's cool, but not has some usability issues (most recent update for a dealership is not always what dictates the color of the marker on the map).
Anyway, crappy dealer experiences are a huge reason why so many people purchase Teslas, and why OEMs like Volvo are creating new brands that they can sell direct.
We have gotten calls from the dealer offering us up to 10k over what we originally paid for the car since then, even with the mileage we've put on.
Absolutely amazing, the world we live in.
Everyone is manipulating this inflation sentiment to wring consumers out of every penny until they're broke.
Stop paying for things where the price has exploded higher and force businesses to deal with tighter margins. Prices will normalize.
So if you want people to stop paying high prices, you need to get them to look at the total cost of the vehicle. And you need to get lenders to stop handing out loans longer than 4 years. Unfortunately they don’t have an incentive to do this because long, high interest loans are profitable.
I'm genuinely curious why someone looks at that final price, and then decides to go ahead with the purchase. More money than sense and no idea of what a sensible price is?
I was looking for something labeled more like "markup as a percentage of what this car was actually worth".
A dealer with a $1,500 markup on a car worth only $1,200 is much worse than a dealer with a $20,000 markup on a car worth $80,000
I guess it just makes sense that they'd be able to throw a larger markup on cars which are that much more expensive to start with.
Is it actually a nonprofit? Or... what does that mean, in this case? Curious to hear more about the business structure with regard to this if anyone knows.
Edit: Creator commented in here that it's a for-profit LLC and the title is wrong
I'm always interested in novel business structures especially around non-profit-ness, but I guess false alarm here!
Paging @dang, correct HN headline here by removing "nonprofit"?
If not, while I get consumers only care about markup over MSRP, it’s likely dealers are not all paying the same price wholesale.
As such, if data like this becomes the norm, likely lead to small dealers who pay more wholesale going out of business — which long-term would likely be worse for consumers; to be clear, not saying that selling the markup data wrong, but it’s likely to impact the market in ways that may ultimately be a net negative.
If you ever are negotiating for a new car purchase, you can use the leverage of the hold back in your negotiations. If you're ordering a car and will pick it up the day it arrives at the dealership, then that dealer gets to pocket the entire hold back as they'll pay basically no interest themselves. Or if you're buying a car that's been on the lot for 6 months, the dealer really wants to stop paying interest on it so may take a lower offer just to stop the financial bleeding (granted, this is rare today, cars sell fast).
Lastly, I personally would never by a new vehicle unless it was for a highly specific need and impossible to find used, since they’re rarely a deal; average new car drops 20% in value the first year.
_________
Related:
https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/what-is-the-dealer-invoi...
1) new FTC proposed rules (which are open for public comment!) would ban the practice of “surprise” add-ons at the dealership.
2) a lot of folks that contribute to markups (and other crowdsourced initiatives) go all the way to getting a buyers order and then report those add-ons when they show up then.
If you’re interested in the FTC rules, read here: https://joinyaa.com/guides/ftc-dealer-rules/
Right now in the US, there's resort fees, booking fees, regulatory compliance fees, and on and on that all get added during checkout. It's so deceptive.
It's been fascinating how you've (very intentionally) built your online following. Between social media vectors, the website, forums, paid tier access, pricing tools, and now insurance, you have quite the operation.
Other folks on HN should take notes on what you've accomplished so far.
Right now we are currently accounting for both markup and mandatory add-ons as a total in the same numerical value. If it's 0 markup but $2995 for N2 filled tires then the total markup is $2995.
We are finding the opposite to be true. Most of our posters are folks that have actually spent at least a little time dealing with a dealership and are reporting the numbers back to us. Our hope is that as we get more postings the false or innacurate postings will be drowned out by the accurate quality ones.
Just say "no".
> Me: I don't want that and won't be paying for it.
> Them: Well we do it for all new cars and you can't have us not do it.
> Me: Well then you can either eat the cost of this unnecessary "service" or sell me the car for $700 under MSRP to make up for it.
> Them: Sorry, we can't do that.
They'll make tons of gross profit because their cost infrastructure will go down, and OEMs will be happy because they still won't have to deal with customers and can focus on wholesaling cars to their "dealer" network.
The rub is in the finance and insurance products. OEMs all have captive lending arms, and currently dealers make a ton of money ($1,500+ per vehicle retailed) in finance and insurance profit. Navigating that relationship will be interesting as OEMs take on more control of the sales process.
It's alright, you can give them a different address after receiving the quote.
And that car was titled, just as every Tesla is after Tesla sells it.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-...
Even though I know better all my products are still desktop-first then checked against mobile screen sizes. It's just the reality of how designers and engineers still work. We should probably get to a place where we have a secondary monitor that by default shows 3-4 virtual mobile devices the entire time we're working.
You would be basically financing my business, at zero interest rate, while I also make a profit on the money you give me.
You do realize that profit is "the excess of returns over expenditure"? it's not given that you are making more money than me (I could easily have an higher markup), but for sure I'm having less problems than you finding customers!
Thank you for doing it.
I got more cars coming, see you on Monday!
This is sort of the problem, though, isn't it? There aren't more cars coming on Monday.
your assumption is that by buying everything I got from me and selling at an higher price than me (doesn't mean higher markup) you are pushing me out of business.
Or that you are monopolizing the market buying all the cars, assuming that you can buy the tens of millions of used cars around.
You're also assuming that I am stupid and I'll let you do that, in the name of principles.
The second time I see you coming in to buy a car I'll check who you are, the third time you come you'll be greeted by a "we are not a B2B company, find another supplier".
That said, I was expecting to be countered on the inherent riskiness of my position, as I'd forgotten that it is indeed mutually beneficial but for that.
and they also need to hope there are enough stupid people on the internet to buy at a markup something sold in the hundred of millions of pieces,one indistinguishable from the other.
more proof that an honest business can serve society better than scammers.
As someone who used to attend more than a 100 concerts/year, I sincerely hate them.
> This is only possible because the the tickets are being sold originally for under market value
No, this is only possible because tickets can be made artificially scarce.
And because there is a portion of the population who owns more money than is able to spend.
An almost similar thing happened to the F150 Lightning, Ford had to threaten dealers that they would withhold any future deliveries if they caught wind of markups.
Before you request a quote? I was suggesting getting the quote before buying.
Doesn't the test drive come *after* you ask "How much?"?
Honestly I am surprised at the attitude that merely showing up at the dealer means that you locked into a purchase, and you can't find out the price until after halfway through the purchase.
In my country (not the US) it is normal to negotiate price before even looking at the car (for new cars, anyway).
Whatever quote they give you is then locked in, they can't change their mind when you change your address details.
Not that we don't get screwed, we do, but that's due to a different cause.
It's like Amdahl's Law for capitalism: some things are easy to optimize, other things aren't, and eventually the things that aren't easy to optimize dominate the system.
I'd argue that using this phrase to write off wider ethical concerns is one of the key issues here.
Many people actually ”need” things, but always end up getting beaten by the person who has more $. It’s just constant battering of people that aren’t as well off as others. It’s often a disgusting system. The poor always suffer due to this “I’ll just hand wave to the ethics and talk about capitalism“.
If you spend 3 hours at a dealer after you’ve identified a single car you’re interested in, part of that is on you.
Yes, I’ve walked out twice. One dealer rescued the deal; the other lost the sale to a dealer about 20 miles away.
Since buyer's time is valuable, and wasted negotiating time frustrating, having a friction-free non-delayed experience would surely be a valuable data-point to many -- as in "I don't want to use a dealer whose average time-to-final-price is more than 30 minutes."
Surely you agree there's a supply and demand curve for concert tickets, where if the price is sufficiently low, all tickets will be bought, and if the price is sufficiently high, few or no tickets will be bought?
Market value is what people are willing to spend for something. If people are willing to spend more on the tickets (the scalper's price), there's an incentive for the scalper to create bots to scoop up the tickets and resell them. That means the artist performing at the concert is leaving money on the table and letting the scalper profit off their underpricing.
The artist should increase ticket prices and cut out the middle man. Of course there are other systems the artist could use to improve the perceived fairness to fans, like linking ID to tickets, or using a lottery system, or selling tickets to anyone willing to wait in line for days. But all of these have their own pros and cons.
Which are all non-money methods of charging more. Whether it's with time or luck.
Firstly, that it is illegitimate to criticise capitalism because it has created some benefits. As if we're not even allowed to dream of system reform because we're currently doing better than other countries. Very little social or economic progress would be made if we all thought like this.
Secondly, that those benefits are purely due to unadulterated capitalism. In reality, Western countries follow a mixture of capitalist, statist, and socialist policies. The poor in the US have seen improvements because of the minimum wage, anti-trust regulations, and various social safety nets combined with economic growth.
Thirdly, that the only thing holding other countries back is "their own cultures". This ignores widespread, long-term destabilising interference by Western countries in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and South America.
I believe there are laws in some locations that make Airbnb show the price upfront on the map and they do for those places. But it doesn't seem to be the norm in the US.
If only they realized that sometimes those local businessmen deserve to have the rug pulled out from them.
I can see these sites working for very specific models and trims but overall bad.
Honestly it’s all bad unless you get lucky it feels like.
CarMax should be a little bit more expensive because you're paying for a 30-day return policy and 90-day warranty even if they're not itemized. But like, for the Tesla linked, nearby RWD 2022 Model 3s are priced between $55-60k from other sellers. So that's 5% over the cheapest comparable listing.
Do they? I brought in a prospective trade-in that had a misfiring cylinder (and thus a perpetually-blinking CEL and a very rough idle) and they were still willing to give me close to the top of the Blue Book range for it.
I am fairly open to the argument that price gouging for necessities in times of sudden life threatening crunch is not ok, but car market is operating like a normal market.
Will they? It seems like scarcity pricing is becoming a more and more common strategy.
That's the entire point of these crappy business practices. At the end of the day, you paid. Thus they continue doing the same thing.
If you really wanted this to change, don't reward the bad business practices.
(Side note: This is a common topic on reddit /askcarsales. Honest dealers are basically forced to do some of these things. The shady dealers advertise lower prices, but lots of fees. So uninformed consumers show up at good dealer and say "Look ShadyDealer has this exact car for $5,000 less! GoodDealer tries to explain, consumer gets mad, etc. etc.)
Exactly. They're trying to find the maximum you'll pay. It's like when you click on "Enterprise" plan on a SAAS company - time for a sales rep to Google your company, see the nice share price and give you a "custom" quote.
Enterprise sales can be a long process because of the procurement process at the company. You can be looking at a 9 month to 3 year sales cycle, where a sales person is going to be involved the entire time answering questions, having security assessments completed, responding to quotes from other companies, etc.
You're going to have more conversations about special implementation requirements, integration with an obscure system, special support, training and compliance needs, etc.
For a long time I've believed that every company really needs 2 "enterprise" plans.
1. Standard Enterprise
- Yes we have SAML
- Yes you can have massive discounts on overages
- Yes you can get a copy of our SOC2 Type II if you sign an NDA.
Price: $X / [month,year]
2. Custom Enterprise
- We'll complete your custom security assessment document
- Discuss special options for training and support
Price: Contact Sales
It also doesn't help that every manufacturer has basically stopped selling their low-end small cars. No more Honda Fit. No more Ford Fiesta or Focus.
The thing is, I don't think that most people buying cars right now even 'need' them. So people like you who do need one are also getting screwed by that.
I reached out to maybe 7 or 8 dealers, had a couple that refused to provide a total itemized cost, and then got back 5 quotes that varied quite a bit (like $7500 on a $30k car).
Did one round of negotiation which ended up lowering the lowest price another thousand bucks or so and went with that dealership.
When I bought a truck in 2019, there was only one in my state that had the features that I wanted (I did not tell the dealer this). I tracked down the fleet/internet sales manager's email and emailed him asking what the Out-the-door price without incentives was on that VIN, then when it came time to do paperwork, I told them to apply incentive codes XXXXXX and YYYYYY. They tried to add on a dealer package for $1500 (I laughed when they explained it to me: nitrogen-filled tires, VIN etching on the windows, tint on the rear windows, and security lug nuts, I said we're breathing 70% nitrogen right now, and you can buy a VIN etching set online for $10), so I kept saying "no" until they asked if I could do $150 which was their cost, and I said yes to finish the deal.
I told the salesperson that I understand they have to make a profit, and I have no issue with that, that they probably made $1500 to $2000 after the manufacturer volume incentive, and he said they only made $800 off of me.
Absolutely brutal.
You can apply the pressure by thanking them for their time but their number is too high compared to the competition and I guarantee the car salesman is going to be calling you back with a better deal.
Any sale is better than no sale, they make money selling cars by volume and will take less profit to close a sale, you don’t know their profit margin so let them eat into it to close the sale at a later time by walking away! If you don’t have time, they will play on these fears to make you think you must sign the paper that very second or you are missing that deal of a lifetime.
Also, you can flex carvana prices and be like, I can buy a car through carvana on my phone cheaper than you guys, then simply tell them you are walking away cause of that and see them magically go talk to their manager and get a better price for you right then or later on the phone, I pulled this off a couple times before. You can figure out their profit margin and markup and see if you can get them to lower the price and still make money. Win-win
I think my favorite out of all of these was "grapes;" the term used by Ford salesmen to refer to fiercely brand loyal pickup truck buyers. juicy and easily squeezed.
The advertised price has to include everything a typical buyer will end up paying.
Eg. it was found illegal to advertise a certain price which only applied if you paid with a certain quite rare credit card. (and there was a surcharge for other cards). You have to show that a good chunk of buyers end up paying the advertised price.
Phoned up the next day to say another dealer in their network had already sold it earlier in the day but not uploaded the paperwork yet.
Polite, but firm, email was sent back opining being disappointed in their customer service as the dealership was so close to work and would have loved to have a long-term relationship with them yielded - a 1250 GBP discount on ordering a new car, as specced, at MSRP.
There are good dealerships out there, but it's liking finding a diamond in the rough.
The last time I bought a (used) car from a dealership, I walked out, and they caught me as I was walking out the lobby and dropped the add-on, and then another add-on after some arguing since they knew I’d leave. That was successful.
Hopefully that goes well for you. When I recently got a new car, I called around to all the local dealerships before I found one that would order me a car at MSRP. But I knew I wasn't done with the BS. It took seven months for the car to come in, and they didn't add any cash markups, but they did give me a money factor for the lease that was really high. I could have walked, but then I'd be waiting another seven months or so and would be paying above MSRP and probably still get a marked up money factor. I really had no leverage.
More annoying than that, though, was that when I asked them about the high money factor, the finance guy just straight up lied right to my face that they didn't mark it up. What I'd heard on the internet was wrong. What the other dealers told me was wrong. The whole world was wrong. Why? Why would he lie to me like that? It served no purpose, because I couldn't really do anything about it anyway. It's like it was compulsive with him or something.
FTFA
> “The problem with the majority of other new car search sites is that they are not using crowdsourced data — they are using the data dealerships provide,” Soucie-Howren said. “We have found that the majority of dealerships do not display the true markup data or mandated add-ons.”
Sounds like your concerns are taken into account - the founders claim to take into account "mandated options" (such as it is).
You could just as easily claim that industry consolidation is "rational" because it the people making the deals make a lot of money, but the overall effect is often bad for society.
Very few people need new car now. Or need to change their car now. It is a flexible market. In the current market supply shortage means that you will have to squeeze 50000 more miles out of your current car in the next two years. It's not insulin or baby formula.
Maybe you're right and this is a fraction of a percentage of the population. I'd be surprised but am open to seeing stats on it.