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Isn’t the purpose of any business to minimize cost while maximizing profits. As long as there are people willing to pay the price, you can’t certainly blame the seller.
Based on all other comments I have an unpopular opinion: I think this is fine. If 10 people want to buy 1 car, how do you choose which person gets it? You raise the price until there's only 1 person. How else would you do it?
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).
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Right. And I don't think we should fault dealers for wanting to make as much money as possible. They're a business after all. 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.
> They're a business after all. 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“.
I've contributed a few dealerships around Illinois. 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 fo…
> 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. 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?
Hey @TreyGuy (or others from Markup.org) 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.
Nothing is "non-negotiable" in business. Just say "no".
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Right. And I don't think we should fault dealers for wanting to make as much money as possible. They're a business after all. 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.
> They're a business after all. I'd argue that using this phrase to write off wider ethical concerns is one of the key issues here.
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!
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We plan to really give it a UI and UX scrub and upgrade as soon as we have some funding. We are operating an MVP right now gathering as many data points as possible and trying to figure out which tasks need implemented first.
Have you considered trying to capture the amount of time it took to get from prospective buyer saying "Let's talk about a deal" to discovering the final price ? 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 minut…
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Just buy a used car?
The used car market is experiencing exactly same markups and 'price gouging' as the new car market.
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.