Do You Buy From a Traditional Dealer And Hope For The Best Deal Or A "No Haggle" Lot To Save The Headache?

While I buy from a "conventional" dealer, he has always made me a fair offer right from the start. We've never went through the price dance. I guess that's why I keep going back to the same place. :)

No haggle benefits only the dealer.

Regular dealer. I call and talk to the salesperson in a reasonable and informed manner and make a reasonable offer. If the dealer is interested in making sales vs playing games they will accept the offer. I don’t engage any further if they try to tell me I have to come in to get a price or play any other games.

These days with dealers having their inventories posted online, quite a few inquiries begin from the Internet.

Our response is to reply with all applicable (i.e. known-to-consumer) rebates and incentives in an initial offer and to suggest a test drive.

The dealer will accept your reasonable offer if it is reasonable, but what consumers think is reasonable isn't always reasonable.

Believe it or not, dealers do not want to haggle much either. Research into the customer's satisfaction about the sales experience is heavily dependent on the speed at which a price was reached NOT the actual price.

We don't let sales people see our real numbers, but we do provide them with numbers that if a customer offers within that range that the salesperson can close the deal pending credit check.

In my experience the above is much easier at Luxury Car dealers than the mainstream ones. I have bought my last four cars this way, and the first time I stepped foot in the dealership was to pick up the car.

I would advise not committing to buying the car until you've seen it and driven it.

"No haggle" means the dealer wins and the customer loses because in the world of price fixing--which this is--the needs of the seller's profits are repackaged as being a benefit to the consumer when it isn't.

If you guys want no haggle prices, I'm for that because the profits would jump at stores.

I have yet to see a long term "no- haggle" pricing scheme work on mainstream cars. IT is a salesman's nightmare - when you see a person walk for a few dollars. Eventually these dealers either give way - or sell out - because of low volume. And matt will tell you - it is in volume that you get your best kickbacks from the manufacturers. Since that is where the money is made - why would anyone deliberately reduce volume by doing this UNLESS they have a monopoly in an area.

Then factor in that no-haggle Tesla is giving steep discounts...

The hours of haggling is not the case in most successful stores. Sales research says to make it quick and efficient. If a customer contacts us online and is going to come in for a test drive on a specific car, they have the option to input all the information we need for the contract ahead of time. Thus, it's about running credit when they agree to a price and getting it over with.

We publish to our sales people an elevated bottom line that if a customer's offer meets or exceeds, they can verbally close the deal pending running the credit and determining trade-in value.

Most people's research into what they think is the invoice etc. and/or the "right" price to pay really is the price we have set as the bottom line, but make no mistake, our profit is still there.

Customers think they can get real facts about the price of a car, but that's just not entirely true.