Creeva’s World 2.0

See­ing we’ve recently been used car shop­ping, I’ve noticed some prob­lems in an indus­try which is at least a sec­ondary issue with the auto mak­ers that exist cur­rently.   We can say auto mak­ers are focused on new cars and could care less about the used car mar­kets, but the deal­er­ships that sell new cars also deal in used cars.  A sale for these peo­ple is a sale all around.  I under­stand that they use tricks to sell you what they want to sell instead of what you really want to buy, but buy­ers are get­ting more savvy and the old tricks do not work.

No Prices?

Now I know the gim­mick is that if the price is not on the car it will force you to talk to a sales­per­son.  I don’t like to talk to sales­peo­ple though, no mat­ter what the pur­chase.  If I’m brows­ing new cars I can see the sticker price, why is this not the norm for used cars?   I would at least like a ball­park of what the car is going to be.   You can jack up the price 20–30% and have wig­gle room for me to talk you down and nego­ti­ate, but if I’m brows­ing and your closed — I’m not com­ing back if there is no prices.   The only way this would be oth­er­wise if the deal­er­ship had a car I just felt I had to own — which 99.999% of the time I look at cars, this is not the case.

I can say quite a few deal­er­ships lost my chance  to come back and look at their cars and actu­ally talked to a sales­per­son because I do most my brows­ing at night or on Sun­days.   I don’t feel the deal­er­ships have to be open when I shop around and browse, but I want to be able to know what I’m look­ing at and what it will cost me.    The irony is some of these sites have the prices online, so the Inter­net savvy are some­what aware at these deal­er­ships, but the guy off the street has no idea.

No Prices = Bad Form

Inter­net Data­bases Out Of Date

We researched where we were going to go look at cars by search­ing online data­bases, we knew that there would be other deal­er­ships around where another was, so we could hit many at once.    Some of these deal­er­ships were 40 min­utes away.   We would get to the deal­er­ship and the car they had online was nowhere on the lot at all.   Now in some occa­sions you could say it was sold before we got there or it was out for a test drive.   For the Sun­day search­ing, the deal­er­ship was closed.

There is no rea­son the online data­bases can not be in sync 100% with the cur­rent stock on hand.   There should not be any cars on the lot that are not in the online data­base (quite a few).   Cars that are sold should imme­di­ately prop­a­gate and removed from the avail­able car data­base.    We live in a world of just in time infor­ma­tion, there is no rea­son that Wal-Mart can pin­point every object in their store which encom­passes mil­lions of items and a car deal­er­ship can not do the same for there inven­tory of hundreds.

Try­ing to Hide Problems

I men­tioned in my pre­vi­ous story that one deal­er­ship pointed out prob­lems to the car before I took it for a test drive.   Granted he did miss some prob­lems (or didn’t alert the cus­tomer to them).  This should be the norm.   Almost every deal­er­ship has a mechanic go over the car before they buy it or sell it.   This helps them pin­point what they can get out of the car.  There is no rea­son not to share this with the buyer.   With Lemon Laws becom­ing the norm, sell­ers could cover them­selves by show­ing a buyer this infor­ma­tion and sign­ing off on it beforehand.

With infor­ma­tion being more avail­able via Car­fax or AutoCheck major issues can’t be hid­den away like they used to be.

Online Buy­ing

There is a small mar­ket for buy­ing cars online, and granted there is small room for buy­ing a car with­out test dri­ving it, it should still be avail­able.    I can go out dur­ing the day and look at and test drive a few dozen cars.  When I get home at night I should be able to login to the site and make my pur­chase.   I wouldn’t waste the sales­per­son time by try­ing to hag­gle, if I’m will­ing to pay the ask­ing price with­out nego­ti­a­tion, I should have that option by pur­chas­ing online.   I could arrange my own financ­ing and not take up a sales­per­son time — free­ing them to other more dif­fi­cult cus­tomers that are try­ing to knock the price down and eat into profit.

I really do not see­ing any of the changes tak­ing place any time soon, but if I was going to start a used deal­er­ship — these would be the first changes I would implement