Car Buying Experience Hurt by the Dying Art of Haggling

According to Newsweek, the pandemic pushed car dealers to step up online sales and eliminate “what millennials (and others) dreaded: showroom visits that averaged five hours, haggling, paperwork, and high-pressure pitches for add-on products like wheel and tire insurance.”

No haggling? No paperwork? No batting down the sneaky tactics some high-pressure dealers try to use on you?

That financial and psychological combat, as I learned from my dad, is the best part of buying a car!

I remember going with him to dealerships when he bought a new or used car.

He’d don his car-buying uniform — worn pants, paint-stained shoes and an old coat with rips in the elbows — and we’d visit four or five dealers.

As closing time neared, we’d find a dealer — tired of having the guy in the beat-up clothes in the show room — who’d give my dad a deal that was usually a few thousand bucks less than what they took the prior customer for.

Today, technology has definitely improved transparency in the car-buying process.

Savvy consumers can use lots of online tools and resources, such as Edmunds, to evaluate asking prices on specific models and determine if a dealer’s prices are high or low.

To be sure, I always use these new weapons when I purchase vehicles. But I prefer to blend them with the old-school techniques mastered by my father.

I bring my laptop computer and smartphone with me when I visit car dealerships.

I wear shabby clothes. I bring lunch. And I enjoy every moment of the haggling process to get the price of the car down as low as I can get it.

I’m afraid the art of car haggling — which is dying way too fast for me — is yet another victim of a pandemic that has changed too many other prized traditions forever.

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Tom Purcell is an author and humor columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Email him at Tom@TomPurcell.com. Copyright 2021 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.