A Tale of Two Dealerships

 If you remember, I mentioned last Saturday that Forry had spent the day at Barton Jeep having some work done on the Toad's brakes and other parts. While he was there with nothing really to do, he started roaming around the lot looking at some of the newer Jeeps. They had a couple of 2011 Liberty Jeeps that had been traded in -- quite a bit newer than our 2005 one!

Forry didn't like the feel of the alignment they had done on Toad, so we went back out on Wednesday to have the shop re-check it. While we were there, he showed me the Jeeps he had been looking at. Since Toad has over 117,000 miles on her, we had been talking off and on for the last year about possibly replacing her. We talked with the salesman John who Forry had talked with on Saturday, but he was busy with a another customer, so turned us over to his partner, Lane.

We spent most of the afternoon there, but could never get an answer from him as to what it would cost us to trade the Jeep in on one of the 2011. He acted like the kind of old-time sleazy salesman, insisting that WE TELL HIM what we thought the price should be, then pointing out how ridiculous he thought our price was (I was looking a Blue Book prices on my iPhone). He would go back to the "boss" and then come back and tell that the offer he had made on the trade was NOT acceptable. This went on for so long, that we finally decided to just give up on it and leave.

Then the first guy John cornered me and told me how foolish we were being, that if we didn't trade now, we would regret it as Toad would continue to lose value and would be starting to cost us "real" money.

Now, I am 71 years old and this guy was talking to me like I was a rather stupid teenager! Then after we had gotten home, he called us on the phone and repeated his rationale as to why we weren't being very smart. He offered to meet us again the next afternoon, saying he could really make us a deal!

I started thinking about the fellow we had bought one of our Neons from many years ago. I had sort of kept track of Thomas Suwanmaneedang ever since on Facebook and knew he still worked for a car dealer (we used to see him and his young family at Spokane Indians games back when we lived in Spokane and had season tickets). I decided to give him a call and see if he had taken any Jeep Liberty's in as trade-ins. When he asked about the price for the Jeeps we had been looking at, he said he could probably make us a deal on a flat-towable Suzuki at a better price than that.

So the next day we went out to see him at Hallmark Suzuki in Spokane Valley and looked at a couple of very nice new Grand Vitara Suzukis. He told us the price, told us what they would give us for Toad, and offered 0% financing for 72 months! So this is what we have ended up buying:

Thomas is one of those people I like to deal with. He was upfront about what they could offer and didn't denigrate our concerns or what we wanted to trade. There were no games of running to a back room to see if his manager would approve (Thomas said he wouldn't think of taking a deal to his manager that he knew he wouldn't okay.). He actually made buying a new vehicle fun -- even though Forry can't quite believe he has purchased a foreign made car!
 

So this is our new tow vehicle. Not sure if it will end up being named Toad II or Suzie Q...?

I did call John back at the Jeep dealer and tell him we wouldn't be trading our Liberty to them after all -- and would you believe I got the same lecture about how we weren't being very smart?!!