We Just Wanted to Buy a Buick

by Michael Satterfield - 02/10/2023

“Welcome to Citrus Motors, it’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” I must have said that opening line about 5,000 times while I was working the front line. Every interaction with a customer is like a standoff in a spaghetti western. The greeting isn’t just about being polite, it is carefully worded to get the customer to utter the magic words: “Yes, sure is a beautiful day.” Getting the customer to say ‘yes’ to something, anything, right away is the first step in getting them to say yes to test drives, or getting to the desk where you can run the numbers. It is a twisted science, honed by former CIA interrogators, brainwashed by body language gurus, and all certified by psychologists, just so I can get you to buy a car. Even the mirrored glass across the front of most dealerships is there so when you walk up to the car, if the salesman has positioned it right, you will see yourself with the car. 

If you have never been in the industry it is hard to explain just how wild the training can get. I once sat through training in a Double Tree Hotel ballroom, with stale coffee and day-old donuts, where Ford trainers taught us to sell F150 against the all-new second-generation Toyota Tundra by telling customers that Toyota is supplying Al-Qaeda Terrorists with repair parts, a visualization I found amusing to imagine was Toyota doing weekly airdrops of Hilux parts over Afghanistan while a Taliban commander has a single tear rolling down his cheek. In another lesson, we were told to shame fathers in front of their kids by asking children if they would be willing to give up their allowance to help their daddy make the car payment since he just can’t afford a nice car for his family. It is a cold business…but everyone in car sales was making money in the early 2000s, salesmen, trainers, managers, it was a bonanza thanks to easy credit and the housing boom. 

But, as the winds of change began to howl through the housing market, the parade of sugar daddies coming into the dealership with wads of cash to throw around dwindled to a slow crawl. Gone were the days when middle-aged men with a home equity line of credit check rolled in to drop six figures on some overpriced, blinged-out, lifted truck, designed to make them feel like ballers, and for a moment, ballers they were. At least one suburban mom was lucky enough to get her Funkmaster Flex Expedition from me for just $15,000 over window sticker before the crash, nothing says you run the streets of Rancho Cucamonga like a black and orange Ford Expedition. 

The crash would come and the shady mortgage loan sharks who had fled the auto industry for greener pastures were now back, tails between their legs, begging for a job on the dealership floor. The party was over, and these fellas were left high and dry, their lavish lifestyles built on the false promise that the housing bubble would never pop were now just stories of the good-ol-days they would tell and retell. At least Franky had a few things to show for his wild ride: a golden AK-47 that he kept in the trunk of his slightly wreaked Beemer, pretty much all he had left after his third wife split and took everything once the well ran dry. I am sure many of these outlandish characters are now in upper management at car dealerships if they hadn’t been found dead in a ditch. 

I share all of this to paint a picture of the car business I knew, and sadly after my recent attempt to lease a new car, nothing has really changed. It has been said to me “there is business, and then there is the car business.” 

The last few years in the car business have been completely ludicrous, on par with the pre-2008 housing crash insanity that I worked in when I sold cars. News of the chip shortage sent retail buyers to car dealerships like they were storming Walmart for pandemic toilet paper. The media had the public whipped into a frenzy, I watched as friends, family, and neighbors all rushed out to trade in their perfectly good vehicles for nearly anything they could get their hands on. Shelling out five grand, ten grand, and even twenty big ones, for a vehicle that wasn’t really what they wanted and wouldn’t be worth a premium ever again. Credit was cheap and banks were willing to make it all too easy to finance these inflated prices. 

Dealers painted the picture that they had to charge these crazy addendums just to keep their doors open, what with the shortage of computer chips and supply chain issues, they had fewer new cars to sell, but the manager of our local Hyundai dealer is now cruising around town in a Lamborghini, so I'm thinking they found a way to make ends meet.

But it is now 2023, the pandemic is behind us, and most dealerships have inventory, however, the highest interest rates in decades have cooled car sales. Despite this people still need to buy cars, including my wife and I, after much browsing of dozens of nearly identical small to mid-sized SUVs we had settled on the unoffensive Buick Envision. 50 years ago, Buicks were gleaming beasts, dripping in chrome with throaty V8s, the kind of car you would imagine a wealthy madman would drive. Cars like the Riviera were sleek with menacing grills, rolling testaments to the American excess of the 1970s, the last hurrah before the oil crisis. Buicks were once rolling monuments to a bygone era of hedonism and debauchery, a symbol of all that is both right and wrong with America. Buick today should be a reminder of that time when life was lived large, speeding in the left lane with the wind in your hair, when men were men and the gas was cheap. But today Buick simply builds exceptionally fine appliances, nothing you will find pinned on the walls of aspirational teens or being driven on the street of Monaco by the Jetset. In a way, Buick is still a symbol of the dichotomy of America, an iconic American brand with a red, white, and blue logo... made in China. 

After hunting online for several days we found a few local dealers who had the Envision we wanted in stock. The usual blast of canned emails and terribly scripted phone calls followed. Still, the real experience would be setting an appointment and stepping into the carnival-like spectacle that is a car dealership. After a few phone calls with the various dealers, an appointment was set, and my wife and I mentally prepared for what was sure to be a painful experience, most Americans rank buying a new car somewhere between getting their teeth pulled and divorce, but since the industry isn’t willing to do anything to change, it has become an expected part of the process. It was Saturday morning at 9:45 AM, checkbook in my pocket, the math is already done, all they had to do was actually lease us the car we wanted at the advertised rates. Mind you we are “well-qualified buyers” with exceptional credit, money down, and no current open auto loans, it should be a slam dunk.

We were a few minutes early when we walked up to the showroom, the vehicle had not been pulled up front, so we went inside, where we were directed to sit in a set of uncomfortable chairs positioned in the middle of the showroom floor. Like buzzards circling their prey, car salesmen started to appear, we waved them off until the sales associate we had an appointment with found us. 

The vehicle was now parked up front, the Sapphire Metallic blue was muted by a thick layer of dust, it looked as if it had just rolled off the truck after sitting on the docks for months. Inside was also dusty, and it was obvious that the vehicle hadn’t been through the standard prep for going on the lot.  We both explained that we had driven the Buick on two great road trips, we were both familiar with how it drove, and we could just look at the numbers. But the salesman insisted we take it for a drive on his pre-planned route, I could see his manager glaring in our direction from the tower, so we took it for a spin. While on the journey I explained I had worked in the business, already done my research, and wanted to lease the vehicle on the advertised program, all of this was ignored by the salesman who had been trained to stick to a very strict script of benign pleasantries meant to endear us to him, which I suppose works with some people.

Returning to the dealership we sat down, I again explained to the glassy-eyed salesman that I indeed can do basic math, would like to lease the vehicle, and I was in no mood for shenanigans. My wife was already growing tired of the pace of events and the lack of comprehension by the salesman, but he had done his job and gotten us in the box, this is where the real circus began. I said again, before he disappeared across the showroom, “Look, we know the numbers, we would like to do the nationally advertised lease program, I understand that this car is slightly more expensive, but I already did the math and know what it should cost so give me your best shot or we will be on our way.”  

I could hear the sales manager reassuring him that “everyone says that.” The poor salesman returned with an updated version of the devious “four-square” a method designed to leave customers dizzy and confused by presenting an overwhelming amount of numbers, but it gives the sales manager all the information that he would need to make the most money. It was obvious that the sales manager is still drunk on the hubris of selling Buick Encores for $5,000 over sticker with two points in the rate, but the numbers he presented were truly mind-blowing. They wanted $12,000 down and $450 a month for a 24-month lease, the other option would be to put $15,000 down and pay $340 a month for 36 months, and a third option was $4,000 down and over $700 a month for 36 months, none of these were anywhere near the program numbers.

Firstly, they had the car at full MSRP, and secondly, they were trying to stick us with a $700 paint protection fee and $600 for nitrogen-filled tires, which the salesman assured us they had already done. Yet, they hadn't managed to wash off the shipping paint from the windows or remove all the plastic wrap. I told him to find out what the money factor was and the residual value, and he looked at me like a deer in the headlights for an uncomfortable amount of time, it was like he just realized that my story of having worked in the car business and being able to do basic math was actually true. He slowly rose from his chair and shuffled back across the showroom to the sales tower once again. 

He returned with another foursquare with more math salad on it, his manager’s goal was to get us to give him what we wanted to put down and what we wanted the monthly payment to be. Which we had already done this when we showed him the nationally advertised lease program on the Buick website, which we also informed him we fully understood didn’t include monthly taxes, fees, etc… But they simply ignored it. I did some quick math on one of the numbers and showed that with the residual value, payments, and money down the numbers don’t make sense based on the sales price of the car. I let the salesman know that we wouldn’t be taken for a ride, and we stood up to leave. As we turned to leave the glass cubical, we discovered that the sale manager had been standing behind us, looming over shoulder, and he expected us to now sit down with him and go through the entire process for a third time. 

He said, “What seems to be the problem?” I replied “The math doesn’t make sense” suppressing my urge to let loose a barrage of insults. He feigned confusion like he genuinely didn’t understand why we would be walking out of the dealership after an hour of wasted time, questioning what could possibly be off about his collection of randomly made-up figures. We just kept walking toward the door with him following, mumbling about how he was sure we could come to some arrangement, but it was too late, our time had been wasted and we were gone. As the door closed, I heard him say to the salesmen, "they weren't buyers."

Now, I am not an anti-car dealer, I believe they serve an important purpose for service and to give customers a local point of contact that can be their advocate back to the manufacturer when something goes sideways. But bad car dealerships like this, not only damage the brand's reputation but the associated brands, as most Buick dealers are also GMC and many times Cadillac dealerships. 

The team at Buick did their job, building a vehicle we actually wanted to buy, the marketing team put together an attractive lease program that made my wife and walk into a dealership, but the dealer's old-school tactics and inability to simply get out of their own way made us walk out. Later that afternoon, I received an email from the sales manager asking what he could do to earn our business, but by that time we had already bought a low-mileage certified pre-owned Mercedes-Benz, I guess we were buyers.