Off the Beaten Plan

I’m in the market for a used car (I may have mentioned this once or twice), and have been for about a month now. Friday night I wrote about the new motivation I have in my car search.

Oh yes, am I ever motivated.

Before this motivation arrived, I had been doing much of my car searching online. After all, with two kids and a full schedule, it is very hard to find the time to actually go out and visit car lots to pour over 50 to 100 cars with a salesman whose first interest is most likely his commission, and not my best interest.

But searching online for a car is sort of like shopping for the best airplane flight fares with a library and a hard copy card catalog. It’s really hard when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.

I sat across from a very nice gentleman yesterday who was trying to convince me that I could buy the $9,000 car because the payments wouldn’t be much more expensive than the $6,000 I told him was my limit. Even though I told him I would only be financing for a short time – as little as six months, hopefully. Even after (I thought) I made it perfectly clear that the payments didn’t matter because in the end I can only spend $6,000, not $7,000, not $8,000, and certainly not $10,000, regardless of the payment.

And it was then that I realized that I wasn’t shopping for a car just then, I was shopping for a car dealership. My budget is small, but the fact still remains that wherever I go there will be some sort of car that fits my criteria (automatic, < 100,00 miles, 4 doors preferred, not horrific mileage, and within my budget). And if there isn’t one right now at the dealership I feel most comfortable with, there probably will be within a week.

The salesman who told me about the company policy to send “problem child” automobiles, no matter what their worth, to auction rather than patch them up and sell them made me feel good about him and the dealership. The salesman who promised to keep an eye out for something and asked if he could give me a call when something came in scored points (for asking if he could call rather than assuming, and for keeping an eye out).

The one who tried to up-sell me instead of showing me the best, second best, and third and fourth best cars I could get for my money? Not so much. And that really reflects on his dealership and how they do business, in my opinion, and I don’t particularly want to do business with people like that.