saint_monkey

Little Dog then sat with us at the supervisor's desk, and proceeded to collapse in a silent pile of rumination and quiet sobbing upon seeing a small stuffed Pokemon doll. (Later we learned that Little Dog's ex-girlfriend had taken a much larger, more expensive version of this doll, plus a large stuffed "Pikachu" from him, and had not given them back upon thier subsequent breakup. Such are the wages of love, my friends.) In any case, shortly a trap door in the middle of the floor opened and the supervisor, our New Best Buddy No.1, appeared in a puff of oily smoke, and half hearted flames. The man was an uneven mixture of every new car salesman cliche in the world, with a few of the common loan shark cliches thrown in for good measure. He was literally the slickest man alive. He was so slick that he was coated in Number Nine Ball Bearing Oil. After about fifteen minutes of his nickle ante Machiavellianisms I began to long for the quiet and subtle machinations of the Lieutenant Castillo cloning accident from Honda of Bellevue. Fortunately, a little known aspect of my wife's personality emerged. Somewhere in her southern fried families' past, there must be a Yankee Trader in the woodpile, because she cracked this five and dime huckster like a nut. She demanded an explainations of the costs, and our supervisor produced the dealer invoice, and when it stated $10,499 as it should have, instead of $14K which is what their price was with the second stickers added in, she demanded a complete and itemized list of the extra costs, and a complete explaination of each. Finally, she realized that the man was literally taking items from above the total, and adding them back in on top of the total on the invoice, like so:

Subtotal           :   $9,749
___________________
Transportation :      $500
Advertising      :       $250
____________________
Total                :  $10,499  

Quoth Mr. Machiavelli: "Now, as you can see on the invoice, the total is $10,499 but you need to add that transportation and those advertising costs there onto that total for this puppy, giving us $11,249, and we still need to add "Dealer Prep" and "Street Value" to that."
Once that came out into the open, we simply stopped listening, in the end I think he offered us the car we wanted at a thousand dollar markup and a 7% finance rate and a $500 "Search fee", but by that time he could have been offering us an Arista Records recording contract and a "Fiddle Made of Gold" and I wouldn't have listened. As soon as we could, we broke for the door, a stiff arm block was required to stop the tall man from throwing an illegal clip our way ("excuse me, I couldn't help but overhear..." yeah, right, good car dealer bad car dealer? No thank you.) All the way home, Mystery and I quoted lines from "Fargo" at each other. ("Yeah, that Trucoat. They put that on at the factory you know. I'm gonna talk to my boss, and he's not gonna be happy about that.")