Yep, this happened right after our lunch. I should have known…

I would imagine your industry is rife with these issues. As a business owner, who the heck has the time to read every clause in every policy. If you don’t have a trustworthy agent that understands your business, you are in trouble — because you won’t know that you were given a bad deal until you have a claim. And then, it’s too late.

If you are resorting to trickery and it just doesn’t smell right, then rule of thumb is just don’t do it.

This happened after our lunch? You knew it was going to be a bad day when you had to pay, huh?

I tell you Sonia; I think I’m getting there too. The irony is that this incident is not even close to my worst car buying experience. I haven’t written about the time we bought my wife’s car a few years ago.

The salesperson was so unethical, tried a major trick with the interest rate, which I caught. I had to demand the manager, and then we spent over four hours buying the car, because I read every word on every document and scratched out certain clauses.

We probably should have walked away, but we decided that due to the hassle factor on our side, to just get it done. In the end though, we consider that dealership completely untrustworthy and have never taken the car back there once for service. Also, we will certainly never buy another car from them.

That bait and switch thing has happened to me in the past and I just walked out the door with them running after me. I just think back when the economy was really bad and car dealerships were closing up like mad. They would have given you their shirt and pants to make a sale then, but not, its back to the old sleazy tactics to get a sale. No thanks.

That’s the sad part Patricia; my guess (I’m not a lawyer) is that the fine print covers the company with the FTC. Yet still, there could be people who fall for it enough to either make a purchase or to at least, as I almost did, have a lot of their time wasted.

Hey Nicole, thanks for sharing! I like to give the benefit of the doubt, but on this one, I’m having trouble doing it. It’s just so blatant; I really wonder how anyone thought this type of thing would fly these days.

As for long-term impact, it was obvious that there had already been so many bad encounters by the time I got into it that the salespeople were throwing the MSRP thing out there up front to avoid worse issues. So I’m guessing there are quite a few upset customers out there.