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Then you would be dooming yourself to paying more for a new car then you do now.
You decide what is fair profit for all of us and then let me know if you can get this coalition of fed up buyers who want one price to agree with it. I do not think you can.
it doesn't need to be the same price throughout the country, it can vary from store to store. each individual store can price things differently and people can shop the places to find the best deal. it is kind of how I buy almost everything else I buy.
Some people like the haggle game and that's fine. I guess why I like no haggle sites like truecar.com is that the haggling is so dishonest. The salesman says all sorts of things that are just flat out lies. Oh, I don't think my boss will go for that and then he goes back and has a cup of coffee and comes back out with another offer. Some people love the game. Me, I'd rather just go to a warehouse and pick up the car I want, without all the BS.
I don't know why buying a car has to be so drastically different than say, buying a pair of shoes.
Simple model - A shoe store buys shoes from a distributer, who buys them from a wholesaler, who buys them from the maker. Everyone makes their markups so they make a profit and stay in business. But the end price, it doesn't matter if I'm buying the pair of shoes online, in their store in NYC, in their store in LA, or wherever, it's the same price. If they're blue, black, green, yellow... same price.
A car goes through essentially the same path, but for whatever reason a car dealership gets to be unlike every other store out there and can just charge whatever price they want and then make someone haggle in hopes that they think they got a good deal.
The reason their haggling with a car is because of its price. I owned a shoe store for 7-8 years. You've got it all wrong. We bought some shoes from distributors, some from wholesalers and most directly from the factories. All were marked up about the same -- double. If you'd have wanted to pay $450 for a pair of $500 shoes (and asked me) I'd likely have sold them to you for that price.
Also, my shoes were not priced the same as they were in other stores. Some were, some weren't. It's illegal to have set prices. Shoe companies can set "suggested prices", just as car companies can, but that's as far as it goes. My store was not in a mall, so my overhead was lower than mall stores and I set the prices a little lower. I also priced the most popular and lower priced shoes a little below my competitors. Some call that "footballing". My biggest sellers were priced about $2 lower than my main competitor priced theirs, because it was a style that was easy for comparison shoppers to price shop them.
My closest competitor for Florsheims was 140 miles away, but they were in a mall, so again it was easy for me to price them $2-$3 lower. For what it's worth, I doubt it helped sales much. I did sell a case of one brand to a gal who came through from a city 250 miles away. She saw that my prices were a little lower than what she normally paid and picked out a couple colors, then asked me if I'd give her a better deal if she bought more. I sold her a dozen for the price of 11. I think that was about every style and every color I had in stock for that brand. That's haggling. We were both happy with the sale.
it doesn't need to be the same price throughout the country, it can vary from store to store. each individual store can price things differently and people can shop the places to find the best deal. it is kind of how I buy almost everything else I buy.
Then we're back where we started. People will use the net and call around to find the lowest price and drive, fly or take a bus to go get it. The stores that aren't doing so well adjust their prices or some guy comes in and says, "well I can go to Atlanta and buy it for X but id rather do business with you." And then game on.
in my experience the ones that say they hate haggling the most and are fed up with it are the ones that do it the most and are never satisfied with the deal they get because they are convinced they are getting taken advantage of. No matter what the situation or evidence to the contrary. They just hate to "lose." Yet when they are on the other side of the table they employ all the same tactics of the game they claim to despise.
Fair warning to everyone. Unless you like to be spammed, stay away from that site, truecar or whatever it is. I was stupid enough to check it out, Still getting spam from all over the places.
The reason their haggling with a car is because of its price. I owned a shoe store for 7-8 years. You've got it all wrong. We bought some shoes from distributors, some from wholesalers and most directly from the factories. All were marked up about the same -- double. If you'd have wanted to pay $450 for a pair of $500 shoes (and asked me) I'd likely have sold them to you for that price.
Also, my shoes were not priced the same as they were in other stores. Some were, some weren't. It's illegal to have set prices. Shoe companies can set "suggested prices", just as car companies can, but that's as far as it goes. My store was not in a mall, so my overhead was lower than mall stores and I set the prices a little lower. I also priced the most popular and lower priced shoes a little below my competitors. Some call that "footballing". My biggest sellers were priced about $2 lower than my main competitor priced theirs, because it was a style that was easy for comparison shoppers to price shop them.
My closest competitor for Florsheims was 140 miles away, but they were in a mall, so again it was easy for me to price them $2-$3 lower. For what it's worth, I doubt it helped sales much. I did sell a case of one brand to a gal who came through from a city 250 miles away. She saw that my prices were a little lower than what she normally paid and picked out a couple colors, then asked me if I'd give her a better deal if she bought more. I sold her a dozen for the price of 11. I think that was about every style and every color I had in stock for that brand. That's haggling. We were both happy with the sale.
^^Exactly^^ When it comes to a new car, people always complain about the dealership model, and that "it should be like everything else where you just pay a flat price." There are one price stores (carmax and other stores that work on the same business model) but people resent them and complain about getting screwed if the one price store is lower than one that gets haggles. Most folks don't realize that just about everything else has a lot more margin built in. Furniture and Jewelry especially have lots of markup in them.
Car dealerships run on a 3% profit margin. Only grocery stores run tighter.
If I'm not mistaken, truecar started as only a repository of information where you can see what prices models in particular setups were going for. I loved how it worked. At some point I guess they needed a better business model to drive revenue so they tied themselves into dealers and you have what you see today. A few years ago they didn't have things like [email this quote to the dealer]. It worked well then when we had the upper hand at knowing the true prices and the salesmen barely realized we actually had a place to research their prices & holdbacks. We could negotiate better because we knew what was bs and what we can get away with (depends on model & manufacturer).
Anyway, these days, you can basically ask for a dealer's internet sales dept straight up and they will give you a no-bs price. A 5-minute conversation over the phone, no upselling or double-talk either.
The site still publishes data about recent transactions but it no longer shares what the dealer paid for the car nor does it promote the cheapest price as the benchmark for other dealers to beat. Instead, it gives both network dealers and consumers enough information to strike what it calls “a fair deal” by letting them know what others recently paid for similarly-equipped new cars in their geographic area. Dealers pay $299 for every customer lead that results in a car sale.
I know of several car dealers who made quite a bit of noise proclaiming they were going to a "haggle free way of buying "..............." you wanted it, we delivered"........." every final price is clearly marked on the windshield "
Nearly all of them went back to " the old' way ( haggling) .
Seems what people proclaim they want is not true when it actually comes time for them to buy.
Anyway, these days, you can basically ask for a dealer's internet sales dept straight up and they will give you a no-bs price. A 5-minute conversation over the phone, no upselling or double-talk either.
This is by far the best way I have found to do it and have done on the last few cars I have bought. Though one of them was a MINI in 2003 when there was no discount off list price, but I did get it FOR the list price at a time when some dealers were marking up.
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That's haggling. We were both happy with the sale.
