Reply To: Simple Pleasures…

It’s funny because the antithesis of simple pleasure is buying a car, but here we are.

I’ve had a few ‘simple pleasures’ buying a car over the years, but I’ve had a couple of tortuous ones as well. The worst was when I desperately wanted to buy a newly introduced sports car for which the demand far exceeded the supply. But I quickly learned that the few dealers that carried that brand were down to their last one or two that they had available for sale. So I got right on it and was able to negotiate a purchase on a gorgeous blue one, the dealer’s last one until the next model year, and shook hands with the salesman after agreeing to pay list price. This was still a good deal because the car was in tremendous demand, and was arguably underpriced to begin with, at $7,995 list, brand new!* Then, after roughly 5 minutes waiting in the sales guy’s office, he came in and informed me that the car had been sold to someone else. Huh? Well, as it turned out, in those last 5 minutes another buyer came in and presumably offered something higher (above list), and plus he had a late model Corvette that would be traded in as part of the deal…and there went my ‘would be’ simple pleasure!

I did end up getting the car from a different dealer, but had to pay a little more – around $500 over list as I recall – to get the car I was hell-bent determined to get. But I was still pi$$ed enough at Dealer #1 that I wrote a letter to the State Commerce Dept. explaining what happened. And wouldn’t you know, I never did hear back.

* Any GPL seniors out there able to identify the make and model of the car? :conf2:

Pontiac Fiero?