Negotiating the Purchase of a Car Smacks of Divorce (from your money)

A huge bald guy with glorious hazel eyes pushed yet another form at me to sign. This one included a bunch of squiggles on a line just above where he pointed I should write my name.

“That’s your signature?” I asked. “It’s worse than the guy signing our money. I guess all you money people have bad signatures, eh?”

He chuckled, “You’re not supposed to replicate them, are you?”

He had a point. This guy was charged with lending millions of dollars every month for people to buy cars. He’s rightly risk adverse. I read the paragraph above the signature and then signed the section, this one attesting to not lying on the previous one.

Buying a car is an absurd experience. In the ten years since the last time I bought a car, I forgot the pain. I felt prepared. I’d done my homework, visited other dealerships, taken test drives, read up on the process and had good equivalents in hand. I was ready.

I arrived at the dealership with my car washed, a written estimate for the amount CarMax would purchase my car and their one-stop price for the car I wanted to purchase.  I could purchase it from CarMax rather than the local dealership, if  I drove 40 miles North to their dealership in Kenosha Wi. Three weeks before, when I visited this Toyota dealership, they quoted $500 less in a trade in than on the paper I now held from CarMax,  but said they'd match it if I could show them the paperwork. I now had the evidence of the lower price in hand.

When I shopped this dealership prior,  I drove the C for City model, one smaller than the 3 model and decided the 3 would be best. I told the Toyota sales man today that's what I wanted, with no preference for color, just not silver, grey, gold, black or white. That left a boring blue, a weedy green and a vibrant red. I also wanted a sunroof and heated seats. Heated seats, it was clarified for me, came with the 4 model, which also comes with a bunch of stuff I don’t care about. I don’t need 8 speakers, extra ports, a Minority Report windshield display or refrigerator.

When the haggling began, we started at the model 4 with the heated seats. It is Chicago after all. They come with something called SoftTec which is a leather like fabric. I don’t like leather, so that worked fine to me. We went back and forth on the cost. The 4 model has a MSRP of $5000 more than the 3 Model, yet, the Toyota Dealership offered to discount the higher costing car to a lesser rate. I knew to be wary.  On what appeared to be a scrap of paper they wrote down the cost with the discounts. I asked them for the cost for financing and on another fake scrap paper they brought back three payment amounts for 48, 60 and 72 months. These were all too expensive. They gave me a new price bringing it down more, but it was too far from where I wanted to be. After more discussion, they went to the CarMax page, saw that their car price for the same car was a thousand more, they dropped the price but it was still too high when we got to the financing and monthly payment. He asked what I wanted. I told them I’d know it when I heard it.

I said, lets go back to the 3 model.

Again, on scraps of paper, they gave me pricing. It was closer, but still higher than what I wanted. I was working with two guys at this point, both Russian émigrés. I took a class once from a famous negotiator, Herb Cohen (You Can Negotiate Anything). He said Russian negotiations was a style. Remember Kruschev’s pounding his shoe on the desk at the UN?  Later it was pointed out that he never took off a shoe. He carried it around for effect. Or maybe his attache' was shoeless. I saw boots in Alex’s desk drawer when he opened it  to show me a seat fabric sample, I knew he was capable of any negotiation tactic.

In all this process, I hadn’t paid attention to time. I got a text while the boys were figuring the next pricing and I saw it was 4:46, fourteen minutes from closing. I stood up, told them that I needed to think about all of this. Herb Cohen taught us to get the other party invested in the negotiation. He illustrated that with a story about a woman who asked the hours of a refrigerator salesman and returned to ask more questions about the appliance four times. Each time, she took time away from the salesperson's other prospects. She got her price. I told the guys that I would come back on Monday on my way home from work. We were $40 per month higher than I wanted to be. I didn’t tell them that. In standing up, they offered to knock off $10 a month. I calculated, at a 60 month payment, that was $600. I told them that wasn’t the point anymore. I needed to feel good about this and right now it was just more than I wanted to pay. They conceded another $10. I said, no… really. I was leaving.

Igor the sales manager shook my hand, asked for the pieces of scrap paper back, thanked me for “your honesty” and walked away. Then Alex said, "You came in here to buy. What happened?" I repeated my story. It was still too high and I needed to figure out if I wanted to live with this number, after all, I would retire in a couple years and I would take the payment into retirement. He did a recap of all the savings on the car. He took off another $10 per month. Now we were $10 away from the price that I wanted. In the meantime they said they could change out the seats to give me leather. Alex said, "I didn’t sell enough cars today, I will do this for you." Bottom line… I thought…. I told them I didn’t want leather seats, I wanted heated and since that was the combo, I’d take the 3 model at my price. Alex shook hands then hugged me.

By 5:30, the show room emptied of most of the customers and sales people. I completed two simple forms, gave them my drivers license and insurance info. The next step included cleaning out my car.

Walking outside, squeezing the trunk key for the last time, I  felt like I was abandoning my kid, but I got over it fast. My new kid sat a few feet away and was red and much shinier. They gotta grow up sometime. I filled two cloth grocery bags with maps, 6 pairs of glasses 3 reading, 3 sunglasses, cd covers and CDs that didn’t match them, snow removal stuff, receipts, rain gear, change, a scarf I thought I lost and old French fries. My new car still sat in the same space where we left it from my test drive. Supposedly, a porter would  retrieve it to wash, wax and top off the gas tank. Four different people asked me to sit while I waited through this next phase. I didn’t. I read Twitter, played Scrabble with Friends, texted with a couple people and chit chatted with Alex, who apparently would stay through to the last t crossing.

Alex wandered off while I played with an interactive Minority Report tv, that allowed me to hear the music associated with different Scion models. Scions I learned are for people who like Hip Hop, Garage, Heavy Metal. What genres do people like who buy those Nissan Cubes?

Alex wandered back again to introduce me to the bald man, another Eastern European, whose name, I thought, began with an L, but the first initial of his signature clearly read B. Since buying my last car nearly ten years ago, I signed contracts on 4 homes and had the attorney get me out of three of them. I felt no remorse for those. It wasn’t the right place. I hadn't attached. I knew getting out of the deal even with a signed contract was possible and the right thing to do. Sitting down with B, this informed my mindset.

In this car deal, I hadn’t signed anything binding yet, only applications. Yet, I felt like I was already undressed and in bed with the guy. My old car was stripped of my stuff and the last handshake on the new car was so many hours before, I forgot I used to drive a Honda. And, these guys were way bigger than me.  I wondered if I had enough juice left on my phone to research a witness protection program if I walked. The B guy then tells me, your payment is a little higher than we originally calculated.

It truly was a small amount,  $1 or $60 over the entire contract higher. Give an inch. Then he presented the warranties; the drive train and engine warranty, the key replacement, free orange juice for life. He told me, you are going to keep this car a long time. He pulled out a binder and showed me all the costs for replacements of windows, keys, mirrors, computers and various parts of the high falutin' hybrid engine. He emphasized that they will go out if I keep it forever. I started thinking about finding my 1973 Chevy Vega.  I was not planning on giving a mile. If I did everything he suggested, and really, it sounded like the right thing to do, it would cost another $120 a month. I balked. I told him this was a deal breaker.

A new bottom line. I bought the minimum offering and he gave me a $300 “coupon” to reduce the cost so my monthly additional cost was $20. They made some of their money back and I have a warranty that lasts an entire year after I own the car outright.

I'm not sure why I believe this, but  I think it worked to my advantage to arrive late afternoon on a Saturday. I never acted in a hurry. I wasn’t. Herb Cohen told us to keep the power. Time is power. At 8:20, B wadded up all the receipts, copies of forms and stuffed them in a #10 enveloped, handed it to me along with my old plates and told me to go back to Alex, who I pictured pacing to get home to his girlfriend for Saturday night celebration for selling a car. I couldn’t find him.

Between 5:30 and 8:20, he sold another car. Alex and Igor were working another deal. I waited till he returned to the showroom, where he gave me two plastic soda cans that are wet wipes with the Toyota logo on them and a four inch packet of Owners Manuals. At 8:30 he walked me out to my new car.

It was dark and cold outside and I needed basics - how to open it with the keyless entry and how to program the radio. He showed me, I told him I could do the rest, but now, I don’t think I remember how. We shook hands. He told me I was an intelligent lady. 

On my way home, I realized I didn’t ask about the lights. Once parked, I figured out how to turn them off. I opened the back door to look in my garage about twenty minutes after parking it to see if they turned back on by themselves for some fancy reason. They didn’t. I will check the car before I go to bed to see if interior lights are on and if the engine is off. Hybrids are eerily quiet. Nothing about it seems normal.

Monday, I will return to see Alex and B to give them my extra set of keys and the title to my old car. I promised Alex I’d have a list of questions for him by then.

             

Buying a car from a dealership smacks of the same feelings as when I got divorced. Money became the focus. Every penny, extra dollar taken or given was hard fought. I didn’t leave satisfied in either case, but in this instance I got a cool new red car that gets 50mpg. And by Alex and Igor's calculations, every month I save money.