The price of an automobile is not negotiable at Scion and Saturn dealerships I am told, so if you don’t like to deal with a dealer, you can go there and rest assured nobody gets a better deal than you do. In most dealerships price is a negotiable item. Has been since the days of horse trading. Each party tries to achieve his best results and if they can’t come to an acceptable agreement, the buyer walks away and tries someplace else. The dealer has many tricks in getting money out of a buyer. The buyer can offset this by reading the April issue of Consumer Reports each year to see what cars are reliable and what scams dealers are likely to pull (i.e. like extended warranties). I wasn’t going to be undignified and quibble over price with the dealer. I simply said this is what I am willing to pay and he accepted it. If he had not, I would have walked out and tried another dealer. Then I was going to shop on the internet to get my price.
The first new car I tried to buy was a 1978 Honda Accord. It was about four to five thousand with a $1000 dealer additional markup and a six month waiting list. So sometimes the market is like that where the dealer makes excess profits and sometimes it is like it is now where you can get a good discount. You just have to know when it is a good time to buy and I am suggesting now is a good time to buy. I am sorry if the salesman did not make much money this time, but they have in the past and they will again in the future. In fact the first Hyundai dealer I went to used bait and switch with his newspaper advertising and had the cars on the lot padded with pin striping and other useless dealer add-ons to the tune of an extra $1000 on the price. So hopefully there is extra profit under invoice where the salesman get his percentage.
