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What I’ve learned from users

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I’ve learned from users

#261

Post by analog31 »

phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #148
paxys wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While what you are saying is historically true, the internet has made the car salesman role pretty much irrelevant. I expect the job (and dealerships themselves) won't exist a decade or two from now. There are enough pictures, videos, spec sheets, expert reviews and forum discussions available online that the word of a sleazy salesman is worth nothing. More and more customers today walk into dealerships only because…

People have been saying this for 20 years. Yet car salespeople are more important than ever from what I've seen. But let's ignore that because you could argue it's just opinion. My favorite example/rebuttal to this is: Imagine a car sales evolves to basically vending machines. You walk up to the box, pick a car, swipe your card, and a roll-up door opens and your car pops out. Amazing! No salespeople needed. Every tow…

I don't doubt what you're saying. I also assume the bright kid is lying or making it up. This is not just for car sales, but any salesman. If I can't find it out myself, I have no reason to ask the bright kid. Sometimes I ask them a token question to see if they'll lie to me.

I'd buy from the vending machine in a hot minute. But I might be a freak.

To be fair, my most recent car buying experience was just fine. It was a new Subaru, just as the pandemic was starting and they had a lot of excess inventory. We paid the asking price, but it was close enough to the best price we could find from our research. The finance salesman pushed every possible add-on, and we simply countered with "let us take the brochure home and figure out what we want to do." At the end we wrote a check for the car with no extra goodies and drove away.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#262

Post by hansvm »

acchow wrote: post #224
vl wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW, apart from fixed price online sales, there are fixed priced dealerships. They advertise price on the website and don't negotiate. You just show up and get car at this price. Very smooth.

Uhhh....they don't add on unnecessary charges? Like a paint coating you didn't ask for?

I had one try to add $3k for invisible (UV) paint the police could use to prosecute the thieves if my car were dismantled. All the extra fees turned a $4500 car, listed at $8500 at that dealership, into $19500. The "fixed price" just meant they were completely and utterly unwilling to negotiate on that sort of insanity, so some dealership down the road got my business instead. $5k later, the same car has had no issues for 50k miles.

Honest question, when the customer knows you're trying to fleece them and is willing to pay a small premium to finish the deal and get on with their lives, why would a dealer double down on something so outrageous?

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#263

Post by jraby3 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #244
themodelplumber wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling stuff is an extremely outward-focused career though, and it's its own thing. You have to be really careful due to the creeping boiler room effect. You can lose track of who/what you are inwardly very easily, due to almost no attention given your own values, and in effect a strong counter-incentive for attending to your own stuff. I have career-coached a lot of top sales people and most of them have been very…

"creeping boiler room effect" -- I never saw this phrase before. I like it. This is the reason that I personally avoid sales people (outside of work / socially). To me: Sales is fundamentally about upselling -- selling you more than you need. How can people do this 8 hours per day, then go home and pretend they are not a sales person? Every GOOD sales person tells me they are "only like that at work". No, they are no…

Doesn’t it matter what they are “selling” after work hours?

I was a salesman 20+ years ago and still engage in up selling my friends. But it’s usually to get them to engage in healthy activities like working out, going for a walk, or eating healthy; or to get them to try a new experience like tasting a new food or being more honest/kind to their loved ones.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m exhausting to them or they appreciate the good intention.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#264

Post by unixhero »

maroonblazer wrote: post #237
ejb999 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather go get a cavity filled, then buy a new car. Do it as infrequently as possible (hoping to get another 10 years out of my 11 year old Toyota). Every time I visit a new car dealer I feel a need to take a shower, just to get the stink off of me.

I once dated a girl whose dad's idea of a fun Saturday was to spend the day at a car dealership to see how low a price he could negotiate for a car. He'd always walk away, regardless of how low they went. I thought that was hilarious.

What a Chad dad :)

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#265

Post by scruple »

lnwlebjel wrote: post #102
phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #94

PGs take on why early stage VCs gain so much experience reminds me of my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience. I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000 cars for over $100 million. (Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these benefits would c…

Interesting. I rank buy a car from a new car salesman as the worst consumer experience of my life. So much so that I've since bought used cars and in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid that experience. I understand that it could greatly benefit the salesperson in understanding the social psychology of the consumer ... but never again will I subject myself to that process.

My last 2 vehicle purchases (2014 and 2021) were through internet sales managers. I told them what I wanted, when I was intending to buy, that I had sent the same e-mail to every $MAKE dealership from San Diego to San Francisco, and that whoever had the best offer was getting my money. It was a painless experience both times.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#266

Post by skhameneh »

> Indeed, very ambitious people probably need colleagues more than anyone else, because they're so starved for them in everyday life.

This stood out for me, likely for reasons different than intended. I've tried to reflect more on ambition and focus, realizing that others cannot read ones mind. In many ways we're limited by how we express ourselves and how we're perceived. Everyone has their own scale of ambition and beliefs; a good colleague will be able to understand your level of ambition irrespective of their own.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#267

Post by dboreham »

geph2021 wrote: post #123
phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #94

PGs take on why early stage VCs gain so much experience reminds me of my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience. I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000 cars for over $100 million. (Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these benefits would c…

In my experience[1], interacting with the salesperson and agreeing on the cars' price is about 25% of the sale process (and hassle). The salesperson nails down price, model/unit, with the customer, which already involves all manner of sleazy games on pricing. After the "sale", there's a much longer gauntlet of pitfalls and traps to navigate: extended warranties, add-ons (roof racks, floor mats, etc...), financing, tr…

I've bought several cars at dealerships in recent years. I found that simply saying "I feel lucky" with a slight grin, when presented with the warranty, pre-maintenance, tire damage and so on, works well. The finance person laughs (sometimes weakly, sometimes genuinely) and we move on to complete signing the forms. A couple of times they pressed the issue, so I said "I feel really lucky" and that did the trick.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#268

Post by dboreham »

bluGill wrote: post #175
geph2021 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience[1], interacting with the salesperson and agreeing on the cars' price is about 25% of the sale process (and hassle). The salesperson nails down price, model/unit, with the customer, which already involves all manner of sleazy games on pricing. After the "sale", there's a much longer gauntlet of pitfalls and traps to navigate: extended warranties, add-ons (roof racks, floor mats, etc...), financing, tr…

Everyone checks KBB, edmunds, and all the others before buying a car. Thus everyone knows exactly what the dealer is paying for the car before walking in. Nobody is willing to leave the dealer a reasonable profit margin or the salesman a living wage. There are plenty of other dealers and nobody is loyal so odds are they won't see you again no matter how good the experience is (if you are a corporation buying for a fl…

> Thus everyone knows exactly what the dealer is paying for the car before walking in.

Myth, I think. That information (the real wholesale cost) is not public.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#269

Post by lifeisstillgood »

mdorazio wrote: post #185
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that fascinates me about UBI (apart from the right wing capitalists promoting socialist utopias) is the effect it (presumably) will have on salaries and companies. I mean HN is populated by people who mostly enjoy their STEM related work, but even so if we did not have to pay mortgages tomorrow I suspect 75% would hand in their notice and go something else - still working but working on their own start ups…

The B in UBI is pretty important and seems to be at odds with what you're thinking. It's meant to be a basic income that guarantees you won't starve or be homeless somewhere in the country. That's it. A backup to fall upon or a subsistence if you don't want to/can't work or a life booster for low income earners. No fancy cars, apartment in a coastal city, big house, vacations, meals out, etc. How many HN readers woul…

We have welfare systems at the moment that achieve this - and it's not really working. Yes, Europe is full of "generous welfare" systems - from actual cash to nationalised health services. They are expensive but do not break the dependance on shitty jobs to pay the rent.

When I hear UBI I do not hear "welfare system that is just about enough to get by in cheapest area of the country." That we already have in most of Europe. And what happens is the cheapest area of the country turns into a wasteland where no-one wants to put a business and the local doctors get the worst set of long-term health cases anywhere.

What I hear when I hear UBI is "lets try a new equilibrium to solve the problem of fairness."

And as your friendly neighbourhood Software Socialist, I would like to try and explain, poorly, with barely any context.

We, the people, conceive of a form of Venture Capitalism, called government. We shall, since more or less 1945, invest in our main resource, babies, feeding them, educating them, and providing basic infrastructure such as contract law, and bridges. And they shall achieve great things. They shall find ways to organise space engineers in ways that NASA could not, or start political parties the way legacy parties cannot, and will build new capabilities. And as VCs we shall find a way to exit our investment, ready for new investments. We shall call these exits Taxation.

And we shall use these exits to invest in the new set of babies - and because of the veil of ignorance, we do not know which ones will be the next valuable entrepreneurs so we will invest in them all, equally. Fairly.

Lets see what the back of the envelope figures look like

US Adults- 250M

US GDP - 23 Trillion Dollars (!)

GDP per adult is 92,000 dollars. (The global version of that calculation is ~10,000 dollars)

To me UBI is an expression of democracy. We do not live in 'idiocracy'. We all know on a basic level we need to work to produce. Its just that the choice of where and how and who with to do that work is not a free choice. The choice of who to vote for is (kinda) free. But if we imagine democracy not as 'where do you put your vote' but 'where do you allocate your sliver of the total capital allocation' we get a different, interesting question. Why can I not vote to allocate my capital each day as I go to work? I would vastly prefer to have my capital allocated to the solar energy transition. So would many folks. That is barely a choice on most ballot papers. But it is a choice in the market place.

UBI is somewhere around there.

Today the question is "why do I have to do the shitty work for shitty pay?"

Current but unsatisfactory answers include :

- your parents were not wealthy

- you have not invested 20% of your income over thirty years in the stock market

- you or your parents were not able to invest in real estate

- we really need someone to do the shitty job and have built a social underclass for that reason.

But if we break those traps, the question is "where is my work best allocated". There is a lot to figure out. But the current system is unlikely to be what we need to cut our current gordian knot

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#270

Post by karthikk »

caminante wrote: post #255
CAPSLOCKSSTUCK wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who found it odd.

GGP is screaming #quityourbullshit. e.g., How do you fail an MCAT? You get a score. The rest sounds like partial truth + embellishment.

He is a salesman, its part of the job.
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