It is spring time and I am on my yearly journey to buy another toy for the summer season. Yes, I do shop around as research, but I sincerely want to buy a car and I have used this opportunity to do some internet mystery shopping. The dealers have been from PA of course and a couple in NC and one or two elsewhere. You would be amazed at the range of responses or non-responses I have been getting.  The first dealer in NC kept sending me emails and addressing me as “Dear Unavailable” in three different emails. I finally wrote the GM and he had the so called Internet manager contact me and she of course said: Dear Unavailable, Thank you for bringing this to our attention. So I wrote back, well I am still interested in buying the car if you will just tell me the bottom line price and I will fly in and pick up the car. Well so far no response about the price, I never got any kind of price to begin with. Now I am sure this dealer thinks they are doing well in their internet department. So I moved on to a car here in PA, I contacted the dealer and oh my!  let the games begin. The first email was that the car was at a dealer  auction and I better come in today and buy or it could be gone. The second email the 2^nd day was: “ Oh the car did not sell at auction but you can buy it at the internet price ” Which by the way was about 2K over KBB retail. I wrote back only because I wanted the car and said the obvious that the car was priced way too high, and that if they had it at auction that they must be willing to take a lower price for the car. Their next response was for me to make an offer. So to keep this game of theirs going I wrote back, well if I make you an offer I will just insult you, and besides you are in the business and you know what you have to sell the car for. They wrote back, my manager said we price our cars on the internet at the right price, so the price is the price or you can make an offer.

To be honest if I was not doing this as research at this point I would have just said” Thanks but no Thanks” and not to go on but finally I said, no Thanks” and this is from a customer that has cash in hand to buy the car. But I never got a price.

    The sad thing is that the PA dealer is one that almost every 60 days they are advertising for Managers instead of correcting problems they are holding on to some outdated processes and have to be losing sales at a record pace, they are probably living off the service and parts departments.

To think that a dealer like this will actually tell a consultant that we don’t need anyone to tell us how to get better is beyond me.

But how many customers get frustrated from tactics and processes like this?

So now I am going to just fly out to a dealer I did a job for buy a Camaro from him, pay more than I want and pay airfare, because at least he treated me fairly and honestly, the way it should be in the first place.

So do you all really think that consultants do not serve a purpose?