LeeMobile

So it’s about time that I owned my very own vehicle.  You know, being a broke student for years on end didn’t really help in that endeavour while I was going through school.  And the usual routine is that for most people, parents are the ones who help you buy your own car when you’re young.  I grew up in a pretty poor family, so that didn’t really work for me as my folks could barely afford to keep the rusty old family car running.

Now that I’m all out of school I can actually for once afford my own set of wheels.  It’s exciting!

Anyways, Renata and I went out car shopping and I had my heart set on getting a Toyota Camry.  There’s just something so roomy and comfortable about Camry’s, and with my first test drive I fell in love with it.  I know it’s odd… you’d think I’d get something sportier and such.

In the winters Renata’s folks hibernate in Arizona, so I get to use her Mom’s Civic SI.  It’s sporty, can accelerate pretty hard (198 horses for a such a small car), and you can feel every bump and knick on the road.  But, I think I’ve opted for the calming and smooth effect rather than the speedy sportster.  Yes, I’m getting old and more boring.

As I was saying, we were out car shopping and I learned a few things.  For one, I should just shut up and let Renata do all the bargaining.  I’m a terrible haggler, and Renata is a born salesperson.  So she knows all their tricks, and knows how to play the game herself.

The whole process took 6 hours, as we hit up 3 different Toyota Dealerships that day.  We met a variety of sales people, with different bargaining strategies and sales pitches.  Some were more pleasant to deal with than others, and all reacted differently to our bargaining.

The first dealership, Tony Graham Toyota, had really nice sales-people.  But they were shielded from bargaining with a sales process where they had to ask their manager for every bargain.  I’m not sure if it was a sales “ploy” where they made us stew while they asked their managers for a price, but it got annoying pretty fast.  They gave us a decent discount, $2700 off of the MSRP, but we wanted to at least shop around some more to see who can offer us better deals.

We swung by Mendes Toyota, and I kid you not I’ve been to hole-in-the-wall pho shops that have a larger room.  Their show room fit like 3 cars, and with 4 or 5 other customers there it felt like a packed house.  Anyways, a sleazy car salesman handled us and didn’t even budge.  Basically, he offered us the retail price, and that was it.  Of course, it got escalated to his manager, and we dealt with him in his rickety old office.  After a lot of hemming and hawing and talking, we got an improved deal.  He showed us his “books”, and the cost of each car and his profit margins.  $3000 off he offered.  Not bad… but the place felt pretty sleazy.

Apparently Toyota’s have very narrow margins (of course, it’s their services that pull in the majority of their profit for dealerships), so we couldn’t get it much lower than that.  At least we knew what the costs of each car was.  He could’ve fabricated the numbers, but they seemed about right from all our haggling.

Finally, we showed up at Bel-Air Toyota at a 4 PM on a Saturday… last day of their work week, and it looked like they were having a slow day.  Bingo!  The sales guy was pretty nice, and he wanted to push a car out as seamlessly as possible.  We settled on the $3k discount, plus some packages and so on.  We got what we wanted, a Toyota Camry that came to $20400.  Apparently Toyota lowered Camry costs down about $4k from the 2008 models, so we got a really good deal.

At the end of the day, I felt like a sleazy car dealer from all the bargaining.  I am not a good bargainer, but at least now I’ve learned how to play a little hard ball.  It makes me think twice every time I buy something, that you can usually get things a little less than the listed price.  I know… I’m so naive.

So, I’m now the happy owner of a brand new ‘09 Camry.  That new smell always gives me a tingly sensation.  Perhaps it’s the formaldehyde in the new upholstery, but I’m pretty happy with my purchase

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.