bigdaddylee82 said:
Duke said:
In reply to bigdaddylee82 :
No, car salesmen are people, and should be treated as if they are.
Maybe, technically, but Dante would stick the lot of them in the 8th circle of Hell.
Agree to disagree. 
When I was a working at a dealership, I knew a bunch of car salespeople, I'd guess we had 30-40 sales staff, about 20 of which were stable constants, the rest were a revolving door. Of the constants, 3 or 4 of them were legitimately good folks, trying to get customers in an appropriate vehicle at a reasonable price. The rest were trying to wring every last cent out of the customer for whatever the most expensive thing they could put them in, and then brag about who screwed who over the most amongst the other sales staff. We had some unscrupulous finance and service staff too, so a lot of them suck too.
So I've developed a deep, passionate, car salesman bigotry.
My experience could be described similarly, but the salespeople I experienced were a little opposite. The revolving door were people like me. Empath Scanners who see the lure of money, the ability to be creative and have a chance to interact with people. I found it to be like the best acting gig I ever had. But after three years I realized that my astronomical blood pressure, bouts of anger, and disdain for the job was telling me that I was being corroded by sitting idly by while customers took it up the butt was costing me my mental health. Watching a rich older couple come in and negotiate just a bit over invoice for a cash deal was interesting, but watching a sales manager absolutely salivate over a young poor couple with three kids because he knows he will make a fortune in interest and can easily snag their minivan for cheap kinda tugged at my heartstrings in a way that was corrosive to my existence. It flies in the face of everything I stand for.
The stalwart, lifetime, career salespeople were the ones who worshipped the paycheck enough that they turned a blind eye to that young, poor couple that we just hosed and said "tough luck, you paid, thanks for the steak dinner." They certainly weren't "bad" people, but they didn't embody the type of human I choose to hold in high respect.
Bleeding hearts have little or no place in a car dealership, except maybe as a detailer.
My talents found their true home in auto repair. I was honest and trustworthy and never suggested work that wasn't needed. I gave customers a full list in three levels of importance. 1- this is why you brought it in, if you don't fix it, your wheel will fall off and you'll die. 2- I also noticed that your CV joints are making noise, and since we have to take it out anyway, it will cost $X to put a reman unit back in. 3- I noticed that the rear shocks are just starting to leak. Not important now, but next year it won't pass inspection. I rocked it. 9 times out of 10, they just opened up their wallets and trusted me with the whole job. I had a customer bring his teenage boys into the shop after a repair and he instructed the boys that their cars only come to me, and the three of them had baked me a Pecan pie... including shelling all the pecans from their own tree.
Back to the topic at hand, I would really like to see what dealers actually offer in person compared to the phone/mail solicitation. At all three of the dealers where I worked, our first offer on a trade was judged by a metric set by the sales manager, and it was always around 30%. At the end of the week, you totalled all the trades that came in versus their black book trade in value, and that number was supposed to be 30% or less. If it was over 50%, he was pissed.
The impetus for that was partly dollar signs and lining pockets, but it was also simply a target. I had the same target in my repair shops. In shops where I paid flag/book time, my number was 50%. Based on an average volume of cars, I had to make 50% profit just to keep the doors open.
I mention that because dealers cannot simply alter their strategy and keep the doors open. Paying you an inflated amount for your desperately needed trade costs them money. Unless they can turn a very healthy profit on that vehicle, they can't pay the salesperson, pay the rent, pay the electric, or pay their state taxes. Selling a car for $1000 more than they paid actually costs them money. It's not a concept of "well, we need to make whatever dollars we can," it's that not hitting their profit percentage actually ends up costing them more money than they make.
So let's say you have a car that you bought new two years ago for $25k and it has 30k miles on it now. It's worth $18k in non-pandemic times. A dealer calls you and says we're desperate for cars and we'll give you $24k for yours. They would have to turn around and sell it for at least (let's say) $27k to break even after overhead. Two things don't jive for me in that scenario. 1) trying to fleece some customer into paying more than new on a used car is not a speculation they would be willing to entertain. 2) although wholesale auctions are more expensive these days, they would have to be more expensive by about 100% before auction cars would be so expensive that dealers would freely offer retail as a trade in. That used car they offered you $24k for could be had at an auction for $10k in non-covid times. Even if they now were selling for twice the price, it still makes sense to get one at auction for $20k than buy yours for $24k.
I call BS. If anyone of you goes to the dealer with that offer, I'm very interested to see what they ACTUALLY offer. I promise you, it won't be retail. It's a non-sustainable operation.