Personally, I like being at the top of the food chain at the Honda dealership. My experience has been that Honda sales people, service people, and administrators all prefer to deal with someone who owns an S2000 over any of their other products. I find that we all get along splendidly. If you bought a 32K car at the Mercedes dealer, you'd be "another buyer".

The only thing that I don't know is whether the mechanics personally like to work on an S2000 over a base model Civic. I'd bet that most or all of them prefer the S2000. It's new, more unique, and requires an higher level of knowledge for the real technical stuff.

-DD-

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by bguernsey:

 

NEVER lease a car from ANY dealer, unless there is a tax break in it for you.

 

Mark, nothing personal and you can be upset with whom ever you want but after reading your story I would say you are probably lazy ,spoiled, and your business skills are severely lacking. Then again I could be wrong.

 

oufly2,

Here is my backgroud:

I'm 26, software design engineer and I put myself through college. My parents were immigrants from Asia with little money. Everything that I have now is because of my hard work and sacrifice.

So before you say those things, look around you....look at yourself ;-)

 

I'm not associating the bad purchase with Honda but every non-luxury dealer that I know charges !@^%$^ market adjustments and they haggle. WTF!

By the way OUFLY2, MRI techs I heard are pretty lazy and brain dead...just operate some machine day in day out....nothing personal ;-)

 

Next time, I suggest you:

-Gather and bring along as much pricing info on the car
-Bring a friend along to help beat on the salespeople
-Be prepared to be a total a$$hole towards the sales people
-Be prepared to walk away
-Read up on the sales tactics they use
-Remember, it is TOTAL WAR when dealing with a car sales person
-Be patient. If the deal falls through, there are many other dealers.

I think Saturn is the only non-luxury dealer that doesn't haggle.

 

So, you're saying he wasn't right about #1 and #3?

#1 Lazy...perhaps: its a BIG purchase. It sounds like you treated it like walking into Wal-Mart for briefs...

#3 Business skills lacking: well, you just gotta agree here. Lease?!


Thats what you started off saying, quite passionately.



So choose NOT to pay these "market adjustments" (whatever that might be).


I tend to take someone unjustifiably slamming Honda very seriously, which is why I've wasted some time on this thread.

 

It's the attitude you present that dictates how you will be treated...

I am only 23, but when I walked in to purchase I had the money prepared ahead of time, and *told* them what I was going to pay... a lease was completely out of the question... w/o spending more than 5 minutes I was already on a test drive in a car that arrived the night before. It's all in your attitude, shoot them down hard once or twice on their comments and they learn quickly...

also of interest, I purchased my car at Lanphere... I paid 1k over (which I was expecting). Every other dealership I went to in the area wanted 5 over (lanphere's sticker said 10 over) and would not budge anywhere closer than 3 over, I must have spent 1-1.5 hrs at each place (Gresham, Tonkin etc.)... Lanphere ended up being the quickest and easiest just as it was with my prelude back in 98 (paid 22,500... msrp was 26,xxx)

The only truely good car buying experience I've ever witnessed was my parents at Lexus (3 times now, good service gets you repeats)... every time they have the car within 30 minutes of walking in, there's no price games and the dealership has offered them to take the car home for 24hrs before deciding every time.

 

Sorry, but to me it looks like one more stereotypical "I'm not responsible because corporate America is to blame" excuse.