I'm on a hot streak this week!
From a miserable experience in the retail sector to a 6 hour journey through drama and lies at a local car dealership....I have had quite the week :)
It's story time, as I explain my experience, or better yet, my wife's experience with purchasing a new car yesterday.
I'm a pretty simple guy. I go into a store, find what I'm looking for, and pay for it. Easy, simple, no shopping around. It might not save me much money, as I'm not being picky at all but it saves me massive headaches. The customer experience for buying pretty much anything in the real world has become a challenge. We can see how online shopping is king.
Anywho....My wife likes to 'window shop' for her products and her new car was no different. She found a few cars she liked (which was about 150 kms away from where we live) and starts sending requests online for more information on the cars. I think this is just a lead generation system, where her name is put into the ringer and she gets some young flashy sales guy to give her a call to sell her on the car.
Again, I like simple. I go in physically to a dealership, I rarely shop around. But she wanted to do it this way and what occurred was 6 hours of my life tomorrow, I'll never gt back but hey....She got a new car lol
What drove me nuts about this experience wasn't so much the sales guy. He was a young dude, looked like he was good at his job and did everything he could to cater to my wife's needs for the car she wanted. After all was said and done, he shook her hand and shook my hand.
Now where I come from, that's a done deal. If you aren't as good s your word, welp....Good luck to you. So I assumed, as my wife did that as soon as the hand shake happened, that was the price agreed upon and a few more signatures and the deal was done.
Apparently, this is when the 'finance lady' got to upsell my wife. With pretty much everything we had already agreed upon at the said price, was now an add on.
And here's what took 6 hours, no one could make a decision. Everyone had to 'clear' it with their sales managers. So anytime the finance lady threw a new 'feature' on our price, we said now, we're paying what we agreed upon. Off she went to 'talk to her manager'.
6 hours of this garbage lol
Finally, after all was said and done, the hand shake stood. The deal was done but my goodness....What a bunch of sneaky sales tactics. The lies were plentiful as the sales manager said they had to 'pay to get the car delivered', even though this was before any deal was done just so we could test drive it. The guy said to our face, he had to buy the car from another dealer so we could test drive it.
Never, in my 4 decades on planet earth have I ever heard of that but alas....The deal got done at the handshake, with hours of drama and 'tactics' to upsell my wife on every little nickel and dome they could.
Sucks because the sales dude that sold her the car, was great. But his management literally micro managed their way, almost to a deal that got pulled from table because...Lying to your customers is a no no in my book lol
So there you have it, two 'examples of how brick and mortar businesses are killing themselves by simply treating customers as commodities.
As for me, I'm just thankful we have new cars so we never have to deal ith this for another decade LOL
