a salesman is walking with a customer in a dark lot trying to find a particular model? don't they have updated inventory?
129 Cars
41–50 of 66 posts
Re: 129 Cars
#421. Why did they start buying cars themselves well before the deadline on the last day? 2. Why didn't they push delivery of the 130th vehicle to the 1st of next month?
I bought a car recently and I can tell you if I've gone through all that paperwork and haggling, I want my car that night. There's no way I'm waiting until the next day to get my car just so some dealership can get a head start on its quota.
Re: 129 Cars
#43"NOTE: the Internet version of this episode includes un-bleeped curse words." Are there really people who care?
Certainly. One simple example would be a teacher who wanted to share an excerpt with her classroom. Listening to the standard bleeped version on the radio and then accidentally sharing a version with profanity to the students could cause a lot of trouble.
Re: 129 Cars
#44"NOTE: the Internet version of this episode includes un-bleeped curse words." Are there really people who care?
Probably not many, but it's worth noting as many people listen to TAL with younger children (e.g. in the car).
Re: 129 Cars
#45I don't understand why the general manager didn't wait till the last minute to book the dealership's two loaner car purchases.
When you go to your sales team and the new goal is 7 rather than 9, morale gets a boost and you try a bit harder to sell those cars. The goal is closer and within reach.
Re: 129 Cars
#46Relevant: http://www.edmunds.com/car-buying/confessions-of-a-car-sales...
Yes, this Edmund's article is a classic! Required reading for anyone about to buy a car.
Re: 129 Cars
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
They used to be downloadable, now you can pay to listen at your leisure... or pirate it..
I would love to pay them for their content, but they only have an iTunes option. iTunes? Seriously? What is this, 2002?
Is iTunes not cool anymore? How are cool people distributing audio?
Re: 129 Cars
#48I listened to this podcast the other day and it was one of the more compelling This American Life episodes I've listened to recently. I say that as a pretty big fan of TAL. They spend the episode interviewing car salespeople and managers at one particular dealership over the course of a week (IIRC), where the salespeople are trying to rack up a certain number of sales to qualify for a bonus payout that means the diff…
"The way the salespeople negotiate between two different parties – on one side with the customer, on the other side with their manager" This is what really struck at me. I was really surprise at how isolated a car sales guy is, even within the same dealership. It truly is every guy for themselves. Is this situation ripe for a disruption?
Planet Money did an excellent piece on just this - Cars Direct attempted something similar (and failed) in the late 90's.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/19/172402376/why-buyi...
Re: 129 Cars
#49This sounds awesome, but I cannot for the life of me understand why the Podcast feed for This American Life only contains one goddamn entry. Who uses this shit? What is the point of a podcast if I can't download it in my podcast software of choice on my home Wi-Fi network and listen to it at my leisure? Am I missing something with a typical podcast workflow? Because this makes zero sense.
Buy their app and you can stream any episode whenever you want.
My podcast client fetches new episodes as they become available in the feed and then stores them for me to play whenever I like.
Your response is overly harsh. Consider there are political and financial challenges they might be dealing with as a non-profit that don't allow them to be as accommodating as you demand.
Re: 129 Cars
#50Car salesmen can be interesting people if you get them to drop their guard a bit and chat. A surprising number of them are simply transiting through car sales to make ends meet between their main career. In a rough economy, car sales is almost always a way to get a short-term job. Of course the negotiation part is annoying and time-wasting. I suppose for every person that gets a good deal, 10 get a bad one and that's…
I grew up around (mostly large, high volume) car dealerships. Dad was a mechanic and was friends with the sales folks. Car sales people come in two flavors, the career guys. These are the guys that know cars and what gets people to buy them. They make good money(knew one guy that was over 300k/yr, he was an extremely rare dude.). This is the vast majority of the guys you'll see in large dealerships now days. The sales person competition has simply weeded out the less than stellar sales people, dealers can't afford to have them around the sales floor.
The second is the transients you're talking about that just move through dealerships because they think it's quick money. Now days these guys are mostly at the buy-here-pay-here places and lower end dealers.
As for negotiation....it's just not like it used to be. Used to be the sales guy could get you a ton off and various other perks like warranties and detail jobs and shit. Now days the sales guy can do some of that, but in the end the big saving for consumers is in the financing office. If you're willing to spend the time you can save big big money by working with/against the financing agent. Note; paying cash is almost always a bad idea when buying a car. The rebates banks offer are HUGE and you're not going to get them by paying cash.