My recent "cheap car search" unearthed this gem up in Lockport, New York. It's the rarest of all front-wheel-drive Chevrolet Monte Carlo's, a 2007, and being an "SS", she's rarer still. She's got only 62,500 miles on her fifteen-year-old digital ticker and the asking price was a quite reasonable $10,800.
Now, granted, I'm not exactly in the market for one of these nor do I really want to spend quite that much on something. Factor in taxes, dealer prep and the challenges of buying a car in one state and registering and titling it in another, at the end of the day I'd be out of pocket the dark side of $12,000. Compared to what some people are spending on cars, however, used or new, it's a drop in the bucket. Still, while not every one's cup of Moutain Dew, this a lot of car for the money.
I found it over Memorial Day Weekend, they were closed of course, and I got on the phone with a woman at the dealership first thing Tuesday morning. Somewhat to my delight, the car was available. Thing is, Lockport is a four-hour drive from my home here on the far west side of Cleveland, Ohio. Although I was "in the office" on Tuesday, my office is in Youngstown, Ohio which, depending on a number of different routes, is 93 to 97 miles southeast of where I live, it's still three and a half hours straight south of Lockport. So, I wasn't about to just traipse on up there. Not with gas at four dollars and fifty goddamn cents a gallon. My time is precious too.
Although the woman at the dealership was pleasant sounding, when I asked her if we could do a Facetime "walkaround" of the car, because it was the "end of the month" and they had more than one-hundred and thirty inquiries over the weekend to get to, it might be a while before that could get set up. I tried to get her to clarify what "a while" would mean and she was evasive. I told her I was four hours out and that if someone could set this up for me asap, I could probably figure out a way to make my way up there if everything looked up to snuff on the FB call. My biggest concern on these cars is rust around the front and rear wheel wells. Especially the rears. So, I waited for a call back. And waited. No one ever called.
Somewhat irked, more by the poor customer service than anything, I texted the dealership yesterday morning to ask if the car was still available and got an auto-response bounce back, "I'll get with my sales department and let you know". I texted two more times out of spite, I know all text inquiries go to a central bank that many can see at the dealership and, voila, I got a response from the woman I spoke with on Tuesday.
She apologized saying the car had sold.
It's not the first time during The Pandemic that I've been put off by poor to terrible customer service at an automobile dealership. Back in the days before Covid, you contact a dealership either by phone, text or email, and the son of a guns wouldn't leave you alone until you threated legal action. These days, the market is so hot they don't have to keep contacting you because they know that everything sells. Even the odd ball stuff that I'm interested in. This too, as they say, shall pass.
Granted, had the car been even a hundred miles closer, I might have been more inclined to make the drive and check it out for myself rather than wait for someone to call me and do a virtual call. Still, some sort of call back before or after the car got sold would have been nice.
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