I want to start this by saying that I understand that a... - Chaustie
I want to start this by saying that I understand that a dealership runs on the expectation of making money. They're not there for their love of uniting the perfect customer with the perfect car while animals are doing a song and dance number in the background. They are trying to make the most money they can. They have bills to pay too. You, on the otherhand, are trying to save the most money. When everyone's math and egos can coincide peacefully you leave with a car and they turn a profit, cue the circle of life music.
I was interested in a 2014 Kia Optima SXL Turbo. There was one I was going to buy in my home city in Idaho, but it became unavailable. I really dug the car though, so I looked around online to see if I happened to find another one. I did at Asay Auto. It was a few hours away, but the dark horse of Pestilance was sweeping the land and gas hadn't been cheaper since I was a kid. I arranged with them to come look at it, and rented a car. The next Monday
my significant other and I donned our plague masks, packed our hand sanitizer, and drove to Lindon Utah.
When we arrived at the lot, a bit later than we intended, the Kia was right next to the building. All the doors were open, hood up, trunk popped. It was the picture of inviting. We poked and prodded through it; it was in great shape albeit with a couple tiny nicks, dings and wear spots on the leather. Its a used car that's six years old. Considering it lived in Utah I was amazed it only had that. You guys are bonkers on the road.
Its worth mentioning right now that the salesman we had be speaking with up to that point was very open about damage to the car. He sent us pictures before we left Idaho and he communicated with us regularly. My significant other was the one primarily communicating with him, the arrangement sounded like it went pretty smoothly.
We went in, spoke briefly to the sales rep. He was as friendly as you'd assume someone like him should be and wore a mask (If you're reading this very far into the future let me assure you that was completely normal. Everyone looked like a Mortal Kombat character in 2020).
After we finished the test drive we were absolutely ready to buy it. We were ready when we got there in the first place, we drove almost 4 hours to get there. As long as there was nothing clearly wrong with it in the test drive we 100% had the intention of buying it. Our snafu wound up being communication and paperwork
The car was listed on their website at 12995. I'm not saying its not worth that price, but we had spent a lot of time pouring over everything we could get our hands on and and we wanted to dicker it down to a lower price. That's car buying 101; you never pay the sticker price. We have bought many many cars over the years. Rember, you're there to save as much money as you can and they are there to make as much. You negotiate to a happy medium.
We went back into the building to seal the deal, guy at the front desk let us know the salesman we'd been working with was busy with another couple, but that he was the sales manager and would be able to run us through our paces (that's not a direct quote). We were fine with this, we were late, it wasn't a problem.
We sat down and were getting ready for the car banter and the friendly back and forth. It always happens, it builds rapport. You don't cold start a negotiation. After that we would throw out our offer and we'd go back and forth until we got a number we could all live with.
The first thing the Sales Manager told us was that the price listed on the website was their most aggressive offer, they do not haggle or barter (this one is a quote). Not a great opening. I don't think the price was aggressive, but that opening sure made me feel defensive. I didn't spend four hours in a car to not haggle on my price. I went to Utah in the first place because the prices there are more competetive.
So at that point I wasn't interested in the car anymore. I said earlier its not that I didn't think the car was worth that on paper, but it wasn't worth that to me. We wound up double checking the website later to make sure we weren't missing a very important disclaimer, but the hard and fast rule of no negotiating wasn't anywhere on their website, nor was it brought up in previous communications. Maybe its a rule of thumb that's popped up in Utah in the last few years, I don't know, I don't live there. I've never bought a car without haggling though, and it did not even occur to me vaguely that this would be the problem.
It would be like if, after a lifetime of the sun rising in the east, I woke up and learned the cosmos has decided the sun would now rise in the west. I wish I'd realized it was happening before it was in my face, because now I'm confused and all my shrubs and flowers are planted in the wrong place.
So again, I can not express how bad of an opening this information out of the blue was, nor how bizarre and alien a policy like this was to me. I was forming in my mind the most polite way to say thanks but no thanks. Then I had the thought that their hard line no haggle policy might not be as hard lined as they said. Maybe it was just some sales tactic that would either cause us to jump on the price because we'd driven that far, or something that the sales manager would, "fudge," later because he's a nice guy and we'd come a long ways to get there. And for the record, a tactic like this doesn't really bother me. Client perception is a tricky beast, and its easy to fudge up someone's temperent. I don't begrudge someone for trying to work up an advantage when dealing with a stranger.
I'm in no way saying that this was 100% what the case was, its just what was going through my head at a time, so I wanted to stay and see how it went. Worst case scenario I have wasted an entire day, and they have wasted a 30 minute conversation and car prep time.
After some very brief discussion the Sales Manager pulled up a figure that was a bit over 15000. I knew there was going be a bump up in the price when everything was done and calculated, I wasn't quite expecting that. So we did what anyone who wants to be fussy with the prices would do, and we asked to see the fees associated with the price.
When we were shown our price, the fees were a lump sum, it always bothers me a bit when I see that because there's always going to be something thrown in there you don't need or want and it makes you feel like they're trying to hide something.
Another thing that makes you feel that way is when you have to keep asking them to flip back to the fees page because they keep popping over to talk about something else. We did this five times, and it got under my skin. This is something I'd be making payments on for the next five or six years, and every fee on that paper was going to accrue interest over the life of the loan. I wanted to understand what I was looking at and that's hard to do when the page gets changed and my questions or objections keep getting interrupted.
We wound up just asking for a print out of everything so we could leave and take a look at it. We weren't loving the rushed feeling of the interaction and we wanted to go someplace where we could look it over and talk amongst ourselves. Also we were really hungry and that was not helping anyone.
This part could get really detailed, but no one really wants to know what I ordered at Arby's so I'll skip it. We had decided we were going to pass on the car. We didn't like the price, we didn't like the DOC fee, we didn't like our interactions at the dealership and we just wanted to move on. They did wind up messaging us a few times and offered to drop the price 12500, which at the time to me sounded a lot like a negotiation (I say at the time for a reason). We were pretty checked out of the whole experience by this point though, and so we told them thanks for your time but no. Then we drove home
Now this is the important part, because I got on this website that evening while everything was still fresh in my brain and wrote the first draft of this review. If you've never written a review on this site, it does not post your review immediately. Your dealership has the opportunity to read it and to contact you about your concerns if they wish. And the next day they did contact us about the review and our experience.
The major bullet points were discussed. I agreed with some things and I was pretty incredulous about others, but the major discussion point was about what soured the whole deal for us to begin with, which was the out of the blue declaration that they do not haggle even though they dropped the price to 12500 when we were already out the door.
The man on the phone was Ritchie Asay, the owner, and he stated that price had been offered after the sales rep and the sales manager had discussed our meeting with him. He gave them permission to drop the price of the car because it had been on their lot for over 30 days and they re-evaluate their asking price every 30-40 days. Basically, it wasn't a haggle. It was an administrative decision to lower the price of the car.
Asay was also very receptive of our criticism of the no negotiation policy and how it really felt like it was pulled out of thin air.
He did make the comment that if it was him he maybe would have asked if such a policy existed before driving such a long way. That question would have been completely fair for him to think to ask, since his dealership had that policy. But nothing in my experience would cause me to fabricate a question like that.
There's a lot of things I didn't ask, because my brain would never have considered a situation where that needed to be clarified. I didn't ask if the chairs in their office were made of peanut brittle even though I have a nut allergy, or if they happened to be a car dealership/beehive farm, or if they had a policy that anyone who buys a car from them gets a free helium tank (that would be an amazing policy). There's no pre-existing circumstance that would lead me to believe that the status is no longer quo.
Asay explained that this is a format many dealerships are moving towards because online purchases, auctions and the like have made prices more competetive and removed a lot of flexibility in car pricing. Which is 100% fine. I will be pleased to live in a haggle free more transparent car buying world so long as I know that's what is going on. But if you're changing a rule put it on your website.
Which he was open to, for the record. He sent us a screenshot later of an online banner for Utah's only haggle free Suburu dealership. Although throwing the word, "only " in there doesn't really imply its an upcoming trend in the business. Also there's a pretty big difference in price flexibility between a new Suby and a six year old Kia. But if they throw something like that up on their website that will resolve my personal issue with the deal. I don't care if its something hundreds of dealerships do, just them, or something inbetween. I just wanted to know the policy was there before I decided to shop with them
I'm not going to tie you up with our whole conversation, but one last thing I wanted to go over was our brief interaction with the sales manager, which felt like a rushed uphill battle to get rid of fees we didn't need to pay. Asay told us that they were actually really busy that day and he apologized that they weren't able to give us the attention we needed or offer us the lowered price sooner. Corona had left them short staffed (for future reference, that was a virus. His staff was not wiped out by a beer that tastes like tortilla chips), and it was a whirlwind of a day. He also said that the fees would have been gone over in greater detail if we had gotten further into the process and that we absolutely would not have been pressured into buying something that was optional.
I'm not really sure what I think of that, to be honest with you. The sales manager was dealing with us, so I don't know how he was too busy to do that attentively. But that's on the surface level, and I get that just because something isn't happening in front of my face doesn't mean its not happening. He could have had a load of issues he needed to get addressed and buttoned up before the end of the day, and that stress leaked out with us and made him more rushed than normal. Stress is a mean beast that makes your emotions go up and your functionality go down.
I also know that if you have a process for something and that's how you always like to do it it gums everything up when it gets interrupted. So if we started putting pressure on fees before his brain shifted into the fee mode I can understand tripping up a bit. I'm not so sure pressureless sales is how I would describe the experience, but everyone's perception is different and life isn't smooth and perfect. I don't think they wake up every morning, twirl their long villianous mustache's, and meet to talk about how they're going hose over customer's that day. Nobody has time for that, there's too many helium tanks to unload from that morning's truck
Toward's the end of the conversation Asay said that if I still wanted to buy the Kia he would meet me half way with it and also give us a gas card to make up for the wasted initial trip. I wasn't expecting this at all, and I thought it was a really reasonable offer. My significant other and I discussed this at length after the call, and we honestly were really considering it. I guess technically we still are, but we have a different car in the works and we wouldn't arrange that trip unless our new deal fell through.
At any rate, Ritchie Asay did not have to call to address my issues. My review is only on this site and for every person who looks at it there are probably 50 who don't know it exists. But he did call, and through some dialogue on the phone and some internet searching I realized that some of the issues in my initial review were straight up were straight up missinformed. Asay can't fix a bad initial impression, but I accept it was a series of unfortunate events between a sales manager who's probably just trying his best on a crazy day, and a hangry couple who's been in a car all day and is not ready for surprises. And also there was a global pandemic, have I mentioned that yet? It kind of changes how everything happens on its own.
So now that I have thawed out, I present review 2.0. Its worth mentiontioning that Asay told me he and his employees met the morning after we visited (they meet every morning for the record, it wasn't because of our visit. They have a business to run) and they discussed my review. I don't know much about the meeting other than my initial sales rep (the one who arranged our meeting, communicated with my significant other, prepared the car so invitingly, and a greeted us very warmly) had been very blue about the review. I didn't understand initially why he would have been upset, because I was very clear that our interractions with him specifically had not been poor. But then it sort of dawned on me that their dealership isn't some huge corporate monster, its a handful of people selling cars. So being critical of his company is being critical of him, and accusing
his company of being underhanded and sly is accusing everyone who works there. Its hard not to take something like that personally. My first review isn't going to see the light of day, and that's a good thing, and its because Asay openened a dialogue with me. That call greatly overshadows the experience itself. It didn't fix every concern in my mind, but I don't think poorly of them. I assume in the near future the price change on the Kia is going to show up on their website and they will have their own banner letting everyone know they are haggle free.
And that is the end of the review. I'm honestly amazed you made it all the way through. I can't fathom why you're still reading, but for your efforts I present you with a mischellaneous fact:
Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. That is a complete and grammatically correct sentance in the English language. Google it if you don't believe me. It has its own Wikipedia page.
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