Fast Talkers

As I posted the other day, we bought Jesse a new car. We bought this car at a dealership in Grapevine near DFW. The whole car buying experience was okay, but there are some things that you have to wonder about. Are big-city folks just so different from us country folk that there are often misunderstandings? Or are big-city folk just blockheads?

The actual buying of the car was great – it was one price, and we agreed to that price when we said we would take the car. That probably saved us much time and effort and the pain of the usual haggling. The young salesman, Mike, showed us around the dealership and went over the driver’s manual and paperwork with us while our car was being "readied" for the "big presentation". The finance man also spent much time going over things. When we finally got to the "big presentation", there were several salesmen standing around including, Mike, the sales manager, and some other manager. We were told to look the car over, inspect it, and see if there was anything wrong. Well, the car looked great, but it had an obvious scratch on the front bumper something anyone washing the car would have seen. We did not get bent out of shape over this because in our country-bumpkin way, we assumed that the dealership would treat us right and fix any problems. Now the dealership guys all acted like "Oh my gosh! How did that get there?" when they had just spent over an hour "reading" the car. You would have to have been blind not to see the scratch. Then they launched into their "we WILL take care of this" speeches. Well, of course you will – what choice do you have? Through all of the fast talk, we finally established that we would leave the car at the dealership, leaving a key so they would have the next week to "make right" the problem.

On Tuesday, when Toby called to see how things were going on fixing the problem, he got a bit of a run around – as if they had forgotten who we were, why the car was there, and what they were suppose to be doing. Most disturbing is that they did not have the key to the car. Two big questions arise at this point; what did they do with the key, and why did they not call us immediately. After some discussion, it was decided that the car would be ready by Thursday night and that we would drive back to Dallas to pick it up. When we got there on Thursday night, there was much discussion with Mike and the manager as to what happen to the key. Mike actually told us that the key had been put in an envelope with the words "paint/Monday" on it, but the key inside the envelope turned out to be a Solaris key – not the key to our car. He also told us that the car had been "pushed" around the dealership to be worked on after getting into the car with some sort of odd key. Hmmm, sounds fishy! But Hey! Just make it right. Once again there was much talk about how they would "make things right and "make us a new key" and "make it all up to us for our inconvenience". We were not upset, because we just expect people to do the right thing. In fact, we were amazed that we had to hear all of this talk.

We finally drove out of the dealership with the new car, but in our minds, both Toby and I were thinking, "These guys are shysters. For all of their talk about doing the right thing and take care of us, they have continued to do the wrong thing." What are the chances they will get the key made for us, and make up for the inconvenience, and do all of this without us having to call them and pester them about it? This story will be continued.