[s-cars] Ebay for Dummy's, or why all car salesmen are jerks

[Salinas212 at aol.com]

--
[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
After a week-long venture into selling the S4 on Ebay unsuccessfully, I've
re-listed it at a lower price with no reserve. Now for some this may come as
no surprise and for others may seem like a gross lack of common sense or
savvy on my part when it comes to the "art of the deal", but I gotta tell ya,
there IS a reason car salesmen are jerks... they HAVE to be or their
customers will kill them, run rough-shod over them in an attempt to get
something for nothing, or worse, just jack them around with no intent
whatsoever to follow thru with "any" deal.

My ad in 7 days took over 3,500 hits. I received 303 ad-related comments or
inquiries from the ad. I responded both favorably and negatively to 171
questions, reasonable, unreasonable and inappropriate requests consisting of
everything from "could you jack the car up and take a series of engine,
transmission and differential shots with wheels on and off" to "would you
make copies of every service record, receipt  for the work you've done and
forward them to me?"

I received requests for several phone calls and accepted the offers, talking
to some for over 1.5 hours at a time. I got offers and promises of call-backs
at specific times without follow-thru even tho I cancelled or broke
appointments to be here to accept those call-backs.

I've heard every S-car tale or fable thats ever been brought up here from
"all S4's can expect transmission woes at/near 100k miles" to unintended
acceleration woes that apparently the S4 was/is notorious for. I've answered
questions en masse that the answers are specifically answered in the ad.
Things like what color is it (even tho there's 4 pics of it in the ad)? How
many miles on it? What have you done to it? How fast is it?How many HP you
think you have (there's dyno print-out in the ad)? Could you do a couple of
0-60 G-Tech runs and tell me how fast it is? How fast does it do the 1/4
mile? How fast will it go? Is it faster than an M3? An M5? How much would you
"really" take for it? If it doesn't meet reserve price contact me after the
auction and I'll make you an offer (the offer was $6k lower than the highest
bid I received).

And I've always wondered why used car salesmen seemed like such jerks. Now
that I've dabbled with about 80-90 tire-kickers, double-digit IQ's,
lowballers, rapists, sodomizers and the clinically delusional I have a whole
new appreciation for the 24/7 crap they have to endure. Must be hard as hell
to be as nice to that last customer on Saturday evening as it was to that
first one on the preceeding Monday morning. And to think... it all starts
over again Monday morning. I'd rather eat a baby!!

This S4 could be prove more difficult to get off than Martha Stewart on dirty
sheets!

Mance
(just another used car salesman tryin to lose over $22K on one car and
finding it nigh on impossible)