FLOYD COUNTY —
My life is consumed with searching for a new (to-me) car. I am about two test drives away from entering Beautiful Mind territory. Soon my husband will come home to find our walls plastered with AutoTrader.com comparison print-outs and little squares of newspaper from the car section. I’ll be madly scrawling notes on each listing with comments like, “Leather seats but no dual climate controls,” or “Auxiliary audio input and LOW MILES!!!”
My lunatic-like hunt for the elusive 2007 Toyota Camry XLE will cause me to cease all forms of functional living. My kids will go unfed and un-bathed. My house will take on hoarder-like conditions with laundry and mail and everything else piling up around me while I search nonstop on Cars.com, expanding my search-options to include cars “any distance” from 47150. My husband will look at me with genuine concern when I ask if we can drive to a Toyota dealership in Riverdale, Utah, “…but look, they have a sky blue pearl Camry with bisque leather seats.”
This is how bad off I am. I just got online in the middle of writing this column to get the exact color name for the car I want and ended up doing yet another search for cars within a 250-mile distance from here. Another 15 minutes of my life lost in the abyss of cars.com. And yes, there actually is a sky blue pearl color, but in the time I spent seeing what was available in Indy, Cincy and Lexington, I’ve changed my preference to metallic blue. I’ll most likely be back to loving Barcelona Red by tomorrow.
Car dealerships across Southern Indiana and Louisville are probably receiving alert e-mails with my photo and a message warning the staff not to approach me: “Avoid this woman. She appears sane, but has no intention of purchasing a car!”
Tonight I walked out of the fourth dealership in two weeks without a new set of keys. I thought for sure I had them. My sales guy promised that he was, “…working for me.” He did all he could to get the guys behind the glass to approve my low-ball offer, but he couldn’t make it fly. At one point I actually asked him, “What will it take to get you to sell me this car today for the price I want?” I was trying to be funny. He didn’t laugh.
When I refused to counter their counter-offer (which was a counter to my second offer) and held tight at my top dollar, the guy behind the glass came down to explain why they couldn’t meet my price. I understood what he was saying. The car was certified and that made it worth about $1,600 more than what I was willing to spend. In fact, I understood it the first time when the sales guy that was working for me explained it (my husband and I called him the good cop).
I used all my years of therapy to communicate with the bad cop, “I hear what you are saying to me and I can appreciate the value you have invested in this car’s certification process. But, the price of this car does not fulfill my transportation needs.”
“So what you are saying to me is that you’re not in love with this car,” he responded right on cue. (He sounded like someone who had played this therapy game before.)
“I do love this car,” I said, “but, it is still just a car and I’ll have to live without it.”
We shook hands and I made my walk of shame out the front door; exasperated that I had lost another battle, but still convinced I can win this war. My goal is to avoid buyer’s remorse at all costs (literally). There is no way I will be able to drive a car that makes my stomach turn every time I think of what I paid for it. At first, my holding steady on a price was me trying to be a savvy shopper, but now I’m on a mission.
My husband has turned on me. I’m paranoid that he is working for the dealerships. Tonight on the way home he told me, “You’re either going to have to increase what you’re willing to spend or lower your expectations.” I’m trying to figure out which cop he’s pretending to be.
Amy Gesenhues is a freelance writer who lives in Floyd County. You can read her daily commentaries at www.AmyWroteIt.Wordpress.com. E-mail her directly at amy@amywroteit.com.
Columns
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Columnist Amy Gesenhues, photographed May 24, 2010. Staff photo by Kevin McGloshen
Discussion
GESENHUES: Car Crazy
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