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Funny story:

My wife is really smart, particularly with finance and the like (she's an academic accountant). So buying a car mostly involves me sitting around and playing on my phone while she works out the details.

So my wife goes in knowing to the dollar what she's going to pay. The car guy (certified used) attempts to obfuscate things by talking about the monthly payment. She must have told him 10 times that the monthly payment was irrelevant as far as she was concerned. The guy was desperate to introduce that monthly payment variable...it obfuscates things and anchors you on what you can afford as opposed to what your spending overall.

We ended up buying the car for exactly what she was going to pay (about 10% off the ask) using our own financing... that guy was clearly not real happy with how that turned out.




Yep, you'd think that an easy cash sale would be attractive to car salesmen, but it screws with their compensation system to a degree that they'd just as soon tell you to suck a lemon. I suspect the reason a lot of dealerships created 'Internet desks' to sell cars at invoice was to keep their salesmen focused on the deals where they could still bamboozle someone.


Perhaps he (and the dealership) were making more money from the financing than from the sale of the car itself. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case...


I took accounting from a guy who used to be a used car salesman. He told me that most customers are focussed only on the monthly payment. They simply did not care what the price was, just that monthly payment.




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