Car Salesmen

Finally deciding you really need a minivan is bad enough, but now we have to shop for one??? Great. That means car salesmen. That means pages from various Thrifty Nickels strewn about the house, concentrated in the master bathroom. It means hours searching eBay and Craig’s List and autotrader.com and cars.com and so on. It definitely means giant spreadsheets will begin to form, calculating the life expectancy of various models and charting the estimated cost per mile. My master spreadsheet already won’t fit on any two pieces of paper I’ve ever seen, but who would ever print this garbage anyway?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever researched a car, seen that car on a sales lot, asked a salesman for the price, and then lost consciousness when he quoted a figure several thousand smackers above the most ambitious of blue books. Did I mention I hate shopping for cars?

Saturday we thought maybe we’d found something. A trade-in just hours old, maybe minutes, with stickers still decorating the back window and evidence of a very well-fed child army mashed into the carpet in the back. I quickly assumed the “interested buyer” pose, the automotive shopping equivalent of Wayne’s “can I help you” guitar riff. The salesman appeared almost instantly, in a cloud of black smoke if memory serves. I swear I caught the last bit of his transformation into human form, but I can’t really be sure. They’re sneaky that way. Anyway, I steeled my nerves and asked the standard “how much”, which was followed by absolutely nothing helpful from him. I guess he didn’t have enough time to figure out how much they could take me for, so there just wasn’t a price for me that day. A million bucks? No good. After all, what if I had two million?

Private sellers are basically the same thing minus training. The biggest difference is that evidently private seller vehicles are all filled with gold and precious jewels. Probably left there by a rich old grandmother. And of course when you make any offer lower than the asking price, you have personally offended the seller and his grandmother and possibly her lost jewels. Blue book? Guess not, his is green.

All this aggravation, and the prize is a MINI VAN!?!?! Something very wrong has happened to my brain that this is an acceptable situation. Might as well apply for the handicap sticker now, we’re gonna need it.

--Ethan