If you are interested in car dealerships check out this
Edmunds.com article on this guy who got an undercover job as a salesman. The article is very long, but a good read.
If you dont want to read the whole thing, the one piece of advice I got out of it is to go to a site like carsdirect.com to get your car if you are looking to save money. It's no haggle, you just go and pick up your car. Of course there are snags sometimes, but its almost always cheaper and usually easier.
When I got my first new car I was lucky enough to have the cash to pay for it flat out. This gives you a good deal of bargaining power. We actually ended up getting a small loan on it to get a $1000 incentive. Worked out pretty well. The thing I did to work the price down is to work two dealerships off each other. They both want the sale, so as long as they dont know who the other one is, they will outbid each other.
I felt like a pimp that day, they kept calling me on my cell phone as I was driving around, offering me lower and lower prices
