Lies, Damn Lies, And Car Sales
March 16, 2004
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Posted by Aubrey Turner
My mother has been contemplating getting a new car for quite a while, since she’s been driving a 1995 Ford Thunderbird. It’s a nice enough car (and it’s got plenty of power), but it’s starting to show its age. She had been gravitating towards the Ford Focus for a while, so I figured that she’d probably buy one. When I arrived home on Friday night I noticed that her Thunderbird was still in the driveway, although she wasn’t there. At first I thought she must have gone to work with her husband (they work at the same place), but later I noticed a set of keys on the kitchen table that had a tag attached that gave the model, color, and stock number for a new Focus, so I surmised that she’d gone ahead and purchased the car. A little while after that I received a phone call from a salesman at the Ford dealership in Tyler who said he was ‘following up’ with her on the Focus. Since it wasn’t the same dealership as the keys, I told the guy that she’d already bought one.
Later I learned that the reason she didn’t use the Tyler dealership is that the salesman outright lied to her. She had gone in to look at the Focus and the salesman had a ZX3 model in stock, but she wanted the four-door. The salesman told her that there wasn’t any other model of Focus available. Fortunately, when she expressed interest in the Focus I showed her the Ford website where you can see the different models and compare them. So she was armed with the knowledge that this guy was lying and she left.
She ended up going to a smaller dealership that was closer to home and where she was treated much better by the sales staff. They didn’t apply pressure and the salesman made the effort to get her the color she wanted. This is one of the things that I use to help identify a good dealership. A lot of dealerships want to move whatever they have on the lot, buyer’s preferences be dammed. I think the dealer in Tyler must have had some ZX3’s he was trying to move and was going to do whatever he could to dump one of them on my mother. By doing so, not only did this dealer lose a sale, he lost a customer for life (more than one, actually, since I will now actively discourage anyone I know from going to him), while the other dealer gained my mother’s good will as well as mine. If I was going to buy a Ford, I would definitely consider this dealer over the one in Tyler.
Sometimes businesses are so focused on the bottom line in the next day or week that they make choices that destroy their long-term viability. There are only so many people you can lie to before word gets out.
Categories: Miscellaneous
I love my Ford Focus ZX3.
But I will be the first to tell someone, Ford Dealers tend to suck, I went to several, and tehy range from, Idiot Savant (Someone who manages to sell cars when remembering to breath seems difficult) to Evil Genius like salesman that can almost convince George Bush to put a John Kerry sticker on Air Force one.
I have found a couple of “good” salemen at auto dealerships, and I will drive an hour out of my way, to get to a good car dealer.
We had a choice of 2 dealers. Dealer A was focused on the cars on the lot, little give and take on price (“Here is a web site that will do this price for us through our insurance company. The dealer is 2 hours away. Match the price?” “Uh, no, can’t do it. No one would drive that far.”) Went to Dealer B, who was friendly, saw the price and matched it, then went out to other dealers to get the exact car in the exact color. No wonder that guy had just come back from his salesman of the year trip to Hawaii…. We also go there (2 hours away) for service.
I tend to try to stay close to home for dealerships, but I’m wary of ones with the sales staff who are circling like sharks in a tank. My last vehicle was purchased through the internet department and it was a pretty low-key affair (no pressure, decent price). But I noticed when I went back there one day with a friend who wanted to see the new Colorado that about five salesman descended on us as soon as they saw us out front.
Anyhow, my biggest area of concern is the service department, since I have to deal with them more often than the sales staff. There’s one dealer in Denton whose service department made is so that I decided to never go back, regardless if they’ve now achieved ‘five star’ status. It doesn’t take much to lose a customer and a lot to get one back (if you ever can).
What a coincidence. I took my mother to the Dallas Auto Show a couple of weeks ago, and the car she liked the best was the Ford Focus. She has a bad back, so some seats she just can’t tolerate. The Focus’s seat was excellent. Consumer Reports also has it in its top ten list for 2004, which means a lot to her. She also liked the Hyundai Sonata, but the Focus is more her style, I think.
Aubrey, the initials for the dealer in Denton you mention wouldn’t happen to be JW, would they? I used to work there (and would concur if this is the one you’re referring to).
I never had much problem with JW. I bought my first Avalanche there in October, 2001. I went there because I was fed up with McNatt (although they had improved somewhat by then I couldn’t forgive them for their poor past performance).