Nonprofit markups.org is exposing the most egregious new car prices • Hacker News Board

Re: Nonprofit markups.org is exposing the most egregious new car prices

#241

Post by BigRedDog1669 » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #211

waffle_ss wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they advertise one price but actually have tons of mandated fees when you show up to purchase 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 lo…

"Resort fees" are a thing but in my experience you don't see them a lot outside of what are plausibly actual resorts, i.e. typical hotel chains don't usually have them. Of course, there are always lots of taxes that get tacked on. Especially pre-pandemic, I booked lots of hotels. (AirBnB also has cleaning fees etc. although what little I've used AirBnB they seem to be pretty prominently displayed.)

On Airbnb there is one price displayed on the map (the daily rate), then when you click on a place, the fees are added and the price changes. But that still doesn't include tax and local fees which add more to the price when you go to confirm. So what you see on the map is quite less than the final price.

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.

Re: Nonprofit markups.org is exposing the most egregious new car prices

#242

Post by ghaff » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:35 PM UTC

BigRedDog1669 wrote: post #241

ghaff wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Resort fees" are a thing but in my experience you don't see them a lot outside of what are plausibly actual resorts, i.e. typical hotel chains don't usually have them. Of course, there are always lots of taxes that get tacked on. Especially pre-pandemic, I booked lots of hotels. (AirBnB also has cleaning fees etc. although what little I've used AirBnB they seem to be pretty prominently displayed.)

On Airbnb there is one price displayed on the map (the daily rate), then when you click on a place, the fees are added and the price changes. But that still doesn't include tax and local fees which add more to the price when you go to confirm. So what you see on the map is quite less than the final price. I believe there are laws in some locations that make Airbnb show the price upfront on the map and they do for tho…

Fair enough. I've only ended up staying at an AirBnB once so I'm not terribly familiar with their interface.

Re: Nonprofit markups.org is exposing the most egregious new car prices

#243

Post by ChainOfFools » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:35 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #159

sleepdreamy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally the process of purchasing a vehicle in 2022. I needed a car (My old one had broken down after 9 years of service) 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…

I just bought a new car as well. It turned out that the "in transit" car had obviously not been built yet. Paperwork charges were a bit high and there were some mostly BS "factory installed options." But MSRP was MSRP and I was actually able to get the charge for the options added to my (already pretty good IMO considering) trade-in price. The main pain was that I had to wait 6 weeks when I had some issues with my cu…

Having worked at a car dealership some number of years ago I was surprised and amused by the way that this business has been soaked in (what would only recently come to be referred to as) dark patterns for so long that they have acquired an almost folkloric categorization scheme, with pithy, locally conventional names identifying almost every well-worn dark pattern sales track. The one they'd use internally to sum over your experience above is "sticker is quicker."

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.

Re: Nonprofit markups.org is exposing the most egregious new car prices

#244

Post by ChainOfFools » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:50 PM UTC

zachshefska wrote: post #124

atestu wrote: post #96

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?

The market is SO inefficient. While you’re right in describing the principles of supply and demand, the reality is that buying a car should be 10x simpler and the price should just be the price. No games, no haggling, no BS add-ons that increase dealer profits. Retail auto is due for a wake up call, and I sense it’s happening right now. You wouldn’t need markups to make extra profit if the cost infrastructure associa…

Conditions may be different now, with the internet at all, but the fact is this has been tried a number of times by individual dealers, and at least in one very large scale circumstance that I can recall - the now defunct Saturn division of GM. Saturn famously touted fixed, non-negotiable sales prices as a feature of their vehicles, part of the total package of the car similar to its warranty and so on.

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.

Re: Nonprofit markups.org is exposing the most egregious new car prices

#245

Post by selectodude » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

alach11 wrote: post #216

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you feel about ticket scalpers who use bots to buy up concert tickets, 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…

> this is only possible because tickets can be made artificially scarce 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…

>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.

Re: Nonprofit markups.org is exposing the most egregious new car prices

#246

Post by tptacek » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 6:10 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #214

tptacek wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently, or years ago? The market is definitely fucky right now.

Last October, but in any case I'd expect KBB to at least try to reflect the market fuckiness.

Yeah, used cars were nosebleed expensive last October (I bought my last car used in September, and remember feeling bad about the timing, because cars had gotten so expensive that I figured I'd get a much better deal if I held out until this year --- I was wrong about that).

Re: Nonprofit markups.org is exposing the most egregious new car prices

#247

Post by tptacek » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 6:12 PM UTC

kart23 wrote: post #59

tptacek wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't buy a Tesla from Carmax (I wouldn't buy a Tesla from anyone), but for everything else, it's pretty great. I bought my last car from them online at an extremely sane price, and they delivered it to my door; a few weeks later a better trim of the same car popped up on their site (many hours away), and I was able to exchange without any drama. I got pretty decent at car buying from dealerships over the years,…

if ya find a decent price, go for it. The convenience is worth it. Personally I found the cars I was interested in (mostly sports cars) to be incredibly overpriced. I've heard their warranty is good too.

I bought an A6, and while I didn't get the price I'd have gotten from a dealership and running the full weeks-long car-buying process, I got so close to it that running the process seemed like an enormous waste of time and energy. But then I exchanged the car, for basically frivolous reasons, and that experience was so pleasant that it feels like one of the best deals I've ever gotten on a car.

Re: Nonprofit markups.org is exposing the most egregious new car prices

#248

Post by drc500free » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 6:24 PM UTC

andrew_ wrote: post #147

drc500free wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point it's not preference. A large number of people - especially lower income and young - are mobile-only. 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 dealershi…

The old guard like Leo are still resisting the new truth backed by stats. As of Q2, mobile represented nearly 60% of web traffic [1]. You don't need to develop sites with mobile compatibility, but it'd be foolish not to. 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-...

I don't think it's resistance, I think it's lack of exposure. I don't interact with people who don't use keyboards and monitors, I only find out about them by proactively looking at stats and user research.

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.

Re: Nonprofit markups.org is exposing the most egregious new car prices

#249

Post by zucked » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #211

waffle_ss wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they advertise one price but actually have tons of mandated fees when you show up to purchase 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 lo…

"Resort fees" are a thing but in my experience you don't see them a lot outside of what are plausibly actual resorts, i.e. typical hotel chains don't usually have them. Of course, there are always lots of taxes that get tacked on. Especially pre-pandemic, I booked lots of hotels. (AirBnB also has cleaning fees etc. although what little I've used AirBnB they seem to be pretty prominently displayed.)

Vegas loves these - the last time I stayed on the strip it was $40+/day "resort amenity" fee that they did a great job of hiding throughout the booking and checkin process.

Re: Nonprofit markups.org is exposing the most egregious new car prices

#250

Post by sizzle » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 6:42 PM UTC

sleepdreamy wrote: post #141

jeromegv wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concern is not that. Yes increase price if demand is high and supply is low. 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.

This is literally the process of purchasing a vehicle in 2022. I needed a car (My old one had broken down after 9 years of service) 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…

the golden rule for having leverage in negotiations is the ability to walk away and not close the deal.

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