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Especially years ago, I always found car salespeople to be some of the slimmyest sales types around ...in my experience all these people were men by the way. When they don't even know their product, and most seem to know very little, it's just all the more annoying especially since I've always been a motorhead and know a lot about cars.
I haven't purchased a new car since '90 and the car I bought then was in short supply with very little dealing so I got it for a tad under list, but that is what they went for then. Back then, I went to a local dealer who had a super duper reputation for straight forward sales, no b.s., fantastic service. They lived up to all of that over the almost ten years I owned that car. They still have an excellent local reputation, but I haven't had any dealing with them for well over 5yrs. A plug: it was Faulkner and they have many car dealerships around Philadelphia and I hear they are still very good.
This time I did it differently just based on things I've heard over the last couple years, so I started with Internet shopping. We were shopping for either an Acura TL or TSX, both brand new only. My wife and I test drove both, I liked the TL she liked the TSX and since it would be her daily driver, we pursued the TSX deal. After a little online hunting, I got "typical market value" which is supposed to be a decent price but not necessarily the lowest. Then I went to Edmunds website and picked the car we wanted and put in my info so they can have local dealers quote me a price. Within a few hours, I had a quote from one local dealer and an encouraging reply from another but no price. I emailed back to the Internet Sales Mgr at the dealer who gave me the price that it sounded good but I needed to do more research so I can feel confident about what a good deal is when I see it. The next morning, he sent me another email and came down another couple hundred bucks. But my wife preferred to also try a dealer closer to home who was less than ten minutes away vs this one who was 20min away plus her dad had purchased a car at the more local dealer a few years ago and was satisfied. Last Saturday we went there, I told him that I got what looked like a pretty decent internet price and mentioned the name of the other dealer. After "checking with his manager" he came back and matched that price. We drove out that day in a new Acura TSX, we love the car and feel we got a decent fair price and not much hassle in the process of buying it.
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