Reason for Visit: Sales (New)
I recommend this dealer: Yes
My Review of Peters Honda:
I hate car dealerships, and the feeling is mutual. But for some reason, Peter's Honda was an entirely different experience from the torture I normally associate with buying a new car.
One thing to put everything else in perspective is the following: I'm a dealership's worst nightmare. I come into a dealership with tons of research under my belt, a very specific maximum figure I'm willing to pay, and a bad attitude. I do believe that dealerships probably don't make money off of me; I'm more of a write-off, where they can raise their overall figures by selling me a car at a loss. So I end up getting treated worse than even the average prospective customer, because they generally know that I'm not really "commission material." But at Peter's, that didn't matter. They still treated me like royalty - okay, petty nobility, but still someone important. This may be a general trend at Peter's, but I attribute it mostly to two factors - Gary Tulchinksy, the salesman, and Zoey Lane, his boss, a kind of general manager for the floor.
By the time I started talking to Gary, I had already talked to about a dozen Honda and Toyota dealerships in southern New Hampshire and Boston's "North Shore". Of course I wasn't eager to spend more Verizon Wireless peak-time minutes talking to another dealer. But it was a different experience with Gary at the outset. Part of this was his very personable and - believe it or not, in this industry - humble manner over the phone. Part of it was that he seemed like a real authority on cars in general, and the 2009 Honda Civic in particular, and he actually found ways of making the topic interesting. It's important to understand that I'm not a "car" guy, and in fact, I'm not much of a consumer in general. I had quickly gotten tired of hearing sleazy sales-guys in white shirts telling me that I'm really "excited" about their car, because I don't get excited about merchandise. But with Gary, the impossible happened: I got excited about a car, particularly the Honda Civic.
Gary lined things up so that when I arrived at Peter's of Nashua, sometime close to closing time on a cold March (2009) evening, a spankin' new silver Civic LX was waiting for me, with the motor running, the heat on, and all of two miles on the odometer. Gary explained things about "aerodynamics" and "wind resistance", and suddenly I appreciated the sleek-ish space-age thinness of the Civic, and I could imagine those attributes working to save me money on gas. He also made me appreciate how comfortable the Civic was to sit in it - or lounge, really - and I suddenly saw this "for sale" item as kind of a minor masterpiece of engineering. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I appreciate cars now when I'm on the highway, although prior to meeting Gary, they seemed more like obstacles to my commute. It's like the 10th grade art teacher who suddenly turned you on to Michelangelo - only, admittedly, in this case, it's about cars.
The best part, though, is Gary bent over backwards not just to get me exactly the price I wanted to pay, but also to get Honda financing for it. I consciously indulged in a slow, agonizing bidding-war-by-phone between Peter's and Auto Fair. Auto Fair got nasty over it almost immediately; between their nickel-and-diming, nominal drops in price at each turn, came invective about how "we will beat Peter's whatever it takes" and a fair bit of hostility and condescension towards me, with the standard head-gamey touch of pressure and ultimatum. [I never told Mr. AutoFair that "the other woman" was Peter's but somehow he figured it out.] Gary was entirely different - very mellow, and accepting of my self-serving exploitation of market forces. Moreover, he managed to make a quantum drop in the bidding process that made me no longer interested in playing the game; I just accepted his price, and was happy not to take any more calls from Vanity Fair - I mean Auto Fair.
[It's worth noting that all the other "players" fell out of the bidding very quickly. Most entertaining was Commonwelath Motors - the so-called "Shop Us Last" people; they stopped talking about how they'll beat any price once I told them what Gary had settled on for a price, and suddenly the telemarketing campaign crashed to a halt.]
I have to credit Gary's boss, Zoey Lane, as well, because she was very helpful in the process of settling on an excellent price and working on getting the financing I needed. Also, I met her and she was very friendly, as opposed to "Friendly!!" What she had in common with Gary, more than any thing else, was the feel of being actual human beings in an industry dominated by life-force-draining automatons. And Gary obviously had an excellent working relationship with her, in which they genuinely liked and respected each other. Gary told me in some detail about how much he liked working for Peter's, in contrast to his experience at other dealerships, and what a wonderful boss Zoey was.
So I'm thrilled with Peter's Honda in general, and with Gary and Zoey in particular. Don't "shop [them] last" - shop them first, then go get abused and nickeled-and-dimed by the competition as much as you feel thoroughness or "fairness" requires - and then go back and close the deal with Peter's Honda. And if you can, make a point of asking for Gary. He won't mind if you pump him for information about the cars - even "other" cars like Toyotas - and you won't just get a good price; you'll get an education, and a surpringly good experience - in a car dealership, of all places.
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