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So the wife and I visit a Subaru dealer in Erie… we'll call them "Old Motors" to keep it anonymous. 😉

We wander around the parking lot looking at Foresters for 20 minutes. Finally someone comes to see us. We tell him what we'd like, and we test drive a car.

Several times he tells us "now, I could be fired for telling you this, but…" before telling us things like "you can get a hitch installed cheaper down the road at a mechanic shop instead of here." Or "you don't have to pay that environmental fee we have listed here on the sticker."

We tell him we're probably going to buy a car on Monday, and if he can write down his best price, we'll leave to consider it, and then we'll either be back on Monday or we won't.

While he checks with his sales manager we use our iPhones to look up invoice on the Forester and find the figures. He comes back and gives us a figure that's over $1800 above invoice. He tells us "I was able to take $500 off, and now you're only $400 over invoice. That's our best offer. You might be able to get that $400 off on Monday, but not if we have to locate a vehicle for you and send someone to get it." We tell him what we saw for invoice price and he tells us "oh, that must be for the manual models."

Uh huh.

That was yesterday. Today we look online, confirm that another dealer in Ohio has the car we want in the color we want. We call them, they offer us invoice pricing for the car and all the little added options, and we put a hold on the car until we can pick it up tomorrow. Total time spent haggling: 0 minutes, 0 seconds.

Now, I have no doubt that the car dealer we'll buy from is making money somewhere - dealer incentives or kickbacks or something are tucked in there I'm sure. But they're not making an extra $1800 on top of that, that's for sure. What kind of car salesmen lies to two young-ish people who are surfing the Internet on their phones and showing the guy the invoice pricing?

This marks the second time I've tried to buy a car from "Old Motors" and instead headed towards Mentor or Painesville in Ohio to buy the thing.

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