[bluGill]

Note that car dealerships are like that because the dealership cannot offer you the later. You go into the dealer having looked up their cost on Edmunds/kbb/... and are determined to give them zero profit from the sale. Worse you know (right or wrong) what you want to buy and so they can't even provide the service of listening to your needs and getting you in the right car.

In theory you should have better luck by walking in and saying I'll pay MSRP (thus giving them a reasonable profit) if you don't add all that other BS. In practice they won't know how to do that because nobody else does

[belthesar]

Having just went through the process of buying a car, and the amount of work, research and effort needed on my part to ensure that I didn't pay through the nose on a car, this is, in my opinion, squarely in response to the car sales industry almost universally adopting predatory sales tactics.

If I could go into a dealership and trust that everyone in the building wasn't out to get me, and instead wanted to build a longterm relationship with me from sales to service, advertised the actual cost of the vehicle instead of a BS pre-fees, pre-additional markup price, then I wouldn't do that. Perhaps I'm not seeing the whole story, but as I understand it the dealerships changed their behavior first, and the customer _had_ to get more savvy as a result.

You put enough customer predatory sales practices everywhere, and you raise a generation who just doesn't trust sales staff. It doesn't have to be this way though.

I gotta be careful though, I'm dangerously close to getting on my soapbox about how difficult it is to be a sustainable lifestyle business in today's day, and how much I wish a return to that.