Dealer's choice
My love letter to car dealerships
It’s hard to imagine a more reviled figure in the American public imagination than the “dealer.” These coercive, amoral actors lurk on the outskirts of every community and stand between average people and something they aren’t sure they really want, but need to acquire anyway. This image isn’t totally fair, of course—there are also drug dealers, or blackjack dealers. But car dealers, with their swimming pool-sized American flags and their ditchwater coffee from plastic machines and their psychologically manipulative tactics that would make Dr. Philip Zimbardo say really now, that’s a little much, loom large enough to besmirch the name of honest dealers anywhere.
I recently came across a tweet from a person who calls himself “Car Dealership Guy”:
Don Hall, CEO of the Virginia Automobile Dealers Association, breaks down why the franchise system still protects the customer. "The truth of the matter is this: we live in your communities, we're part of your communities, we've been around for generations, and we give a damn about our communities. The fact of matter is that Tesla's model is not a model that gives you the kind of buying experience that you're entitled to and should have. With franchise system, you got a choice, and you got a lot of folks who will compete and will do whatever it takes to earn your business and trust." (Tweet)
It’s important that you understand that I am not using hyperbole when I say that calling the current car dealership regime “the kind of buying experience that you're entitled to and should have” the single most degrading, insulting thing that I have ever read.
Does Don really think so little of his fellow creatures? We who create, who love, who dance, who look up at the same stars as he does? That, despite all that, the best we are entitled to is spending a couple hours sitting at a cheap wobbly table as a grown man goes back and forth to “ask my manager” in response to any question, ranging from “can you make a deal at this number?” or “can we remove the fake ‘padding our bottom-line oopsie bonus insurance'?”, yes, but also “what time is it?” or “what is your name?” Who brought your estimation of humanity so low? Are we not made of the same stuff—fallible, yes, but no less deserving of grace and dignity?
My wife and I bought a car in the spring. I’ll preface this by saying: I’m not a haggler. I like the system, which I use with great success in 99.99% of commercial transactions, in which a seller sets a price and then I look at that price and make a little decision in my head whether to buy the item or not. I try to approach interactions with people with openness and candor, which, in a car dealership, makes me the equivalent of that chained-up goat in Jurassic Park.
For those mercifully unaware1, the modern car dealership experience goes something like this:
Customer walks in the door. Sales reps bite at each other’s necks like ravenous hyenas until the largest and meanest one emerges and walks over to you and greets you with a carnivorous smile, an oleaginous handshake, and the deadest eyes you have ever seen.
You look at different models while the sales rep simulates human rapport-building techniques (“You have family? Good. I have family. You’ll probably want to pay up for the third row.”)
You go over to the aforementioned wobbly table. You ask the sales rep how much money the car costs. He gives you either (a) an embarrassed look, like you’ve just asked him to reveal the name of his crush, or (b) a perplexed look, like you’ve asked him to solve a complex math equation. Sorry, he says. I have to go ask the finance manager. During the approximately eleven years he takes to go talk to the finance manager, you sit at the table and wonder why you are talking to someone who doesn’t have the power to make any decisions. You resolve to—next time—hire someone to serve as your proxy, who will sit at the table and say he needs to take any counteroffers to his purchasing manager, which will be you, sitting a few yards away.
The sales rep will return and give you a figure several thousand dollars above the sticker on the car you looked at. He will say this as if it is the height of generosity, and that he is frankly amazed that any customer could be as lucky as you.
You will ask him for a lower price. He will react as if you have spat on him. He will retreat to the finance manager.
During the time where he is conferring with the finance manager, scientists will pioneer a new form of energy, several wars will begin and end, you will die and be reincarnated and live to adulthood and eventually need to buy a car and will return to the wobbly table.
The sales rep will return with genuine fear in his eyes, with a stooped, cowering stance as if the finance manager has just been beating him with a hose for daring to stand up for the customer. He will look around with darting eyes and then turn on a small stereo with anodyne rock music, and then will gesture for you to crouch under the table. “They might be listening to us right now,” he will say. “They might kill me for this. But I see in your heart that you are a good man. And I do not want to see you mistreated. If this is where it ends for me, so be it. I am tired of seeing the working man screwed over to line the pockets of fat cats like him” (he jerks a derisive thumb over his shoulder towards the finance manager, who is watching all of this with smug condescension). “For you, my beautiful honest friend, I am willing to make you an offer that is fair.” Then, he will tell you a figure maybe seven dollars lower than the earlier offer.
You ask to talk to the finance manager. American civilization collapses. Humans are replaced with a species of floating gelatinous orbs.
The finance manager orb scuds lazily through the air to you. “You are dirt,” he says. “It is beneath me to address a life form as low as you. For the intransigence of questioning my price, you can now pay 3 times the sticker price, and I am going to saw off your leg with a steak knife.”
Ok, fine, you say. You hop on one foot over to the purchasing counter, sign some forms, and grab the keys.
You take a picture of the car and text “New ride 😎” to your group chat. It gets one thumbs up.
Notes:
Why did I write this? I loved the idea of “the kind of buying experience that you're entitled to” in that quotation. Buying a car is the single worst buying experience I have ever had in my life, and I like the idea that Don Hall knows this and just happens to feel that I, personally, am scum.
What I’m reading: I’m reading the first volume of the Library of America’s American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s. Finished Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade, which is an awesome, brief novel about an alien scout ship landing in England in 1345, and then knights killing all the aliens and taking their scout ship to outers pace and killing all the aliens on the planet they land on, and eventually leading a crusade throughout the galaxy. The conceit is that the invading Wersgorix aliens have evolved so far technologically that they have lost any abilities for close combat, and so crusading Englishmen can basically take them out. Now, I’m onto Way Station by Clifford D. Simak, about an ageless Civil War veteran in rural Wisconsin in the 1960s, who tends to an interstellar “way station” and communes with various aliens as they crisscross the galaxy. I’d recommend both!
If this is you, strive to keep it this way; my honest recommendation is that it is better to be hit by a car than to purchase a car.