So I’ve had my little red car for a few years now and love it. I drive barely 5000 kilometres a year but those that I do manage are enjoyable. All wheel drive is handy in the snow and let’s face it, red is the colour to have. About the only drawback to the Juke is the fact that it can’t haul plywood for construction or hay for garden borders. Oh, wait. That’s what I’m trying to do. Bugger. Time to sell the car and get a pickup truck again it seems.
It has actually been time to sell it for several months now but the locals up here in the countryside haven’t really been that excited about such prospects with my own self-marketing. I think maybe they all need trucks too. Down in the big city there’s more of a market and so I thought, why not just drive that direction and joust with a car dealer a bit to suss out a trade. Sure they’ll take their cut but they had some good old trucks in their lists that would serve me well and I’d get some much needed cash in return for the difference in value that would help me leverage into building a house out at the farm. Not to mention let me haul fertilizer and plant stock much easier. At least that was the theory.
Not to bore you with numbers but basically, a dealer uses fairly predictable prices when valuing used vehicles. In this day and age anyone can look them up online. Of course there’s one number for wholesale and a much higher number for retail but hey, they have to make a buck and have access to the supply shuffling outlets used in that industry. I don’t begrudge them a reasonable profit for that service. The net for my car is that it should have been between $12,500 and $14,000 for a wholesale trade with retail about $2K more.
Imagine my surprise when the cheeky bastards tried to offer me $9000. Ridiculous. I thought in the information age those sorts of undervaluing scams would have gone the way of the dodo. Apparently not. I was so flabbergasted that he even tried that low a number on me I asked to make sure he got the right car entered into his database. “No, I just asked my manager and he said we’d retail that car at $13000.” Ignoring for a moment that’s a 30% profit margin in a business that averages closer to ten or fifteen percent depending on which industry expert you ask, that’s just whack.
I called his bluff on the spot by pointing out that his own company had sold nearly identical cars in the last two months for $16900 and $15895. I was even so kind as to give him his own internal stock numbers on them so he could do the math himself, probably with his manager’s help. Like I wasn’t going to notice that little tidbit. Sheesh, it took ten minutes of research online to find the facts. Whether you pick blatant lie, underhanded scam, or complete ineptitude as cause, any one of them was enough for me to laugh at him as I walked out the door shaking my head. He actually looked offended that I was done with his game so soon.
Lump all the overhead you want on there but those are still a ridiculous numbers. What irks me more is that some people walk through those same doors and get ripped off. Sure they should have done their homework but shouldn’t these con artists be at least somewhat culpable? After the really wonderful buying experience I had with a different used dealer a few years ago, I had hoped these sorts of stereotypical “used car dealer” shenanigans were gone forever. Seems you still have to weed out lots of bad from the good when the numbers get big.
Anyone want to buy a cute red car?
