The President of Earl Stewart Toyota may be betraying his tent-sale and bait-and-switch brethren with his blog, Earl Stewart On Cars.
On the blog, he gives advice to car buyers and owners on how to deal with dealers, service people, and pitfalls to avoid. Here’s a sample:
The “Big Sale Event”. If you look in today’s newspaper, you will find that most car dealers in your area are having a sale of some kind. It may be because of a current holiday, “too large an inventory” of cars, to “reduce their taxes”, “the manager is out of town”, or some other nefarious lure. Advertising 101 says that you should give the prospective buyer a “motive to act”. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter whether the motive is real or not. The fact is that most car dealers do not sell their cars for less during “sales events” than they do at any other time. I point this out so that you don’t rush your buying decision. If you don’t buy a car during the tight time constraints of a phony sales event, you can negotiate just as good a price the next day. The exceptions to this are legitimate rebates offered by the manufacturer. These often expire at the end of the month which is one reason why the “last day of the month” really can be the best time to buy a car”.
It’ll be interesting to see where this blog goes.
Using ‘honest’ and ‘Car dealer’ in the same sentence, er, headline?
Priceless.
Thanks. There’s a first time for everything!
Uh-oh. If this keeps up, used car dealers are soon going to jump above ad people in the Gallup poll.