A Big Twuck
While the car was getting washed up Nik and I walked across the street and had lunch at the Olive Garden. We talked about the car while we ate. The situation was essentially this: We were talking at least $1,000 worth of repairs to get the Saturn into decent running condition (the kind that would let us get from the 138,000 miles to around 175,000) for a car that at the moment was worth maybe $2,000 to a private buyer. So at most we’d make $1K on the deal and more likely we’d walk away with something akin to $500 or less (especially if you counted the $250 we’d just spent on it and any advertising or haggling that would certainly occur). But the longer we let it sit without being used, the more it was just a waste of space.
We toyed with several different ideas but in the end we talked carefully about our finances and decided that we might just want to look into trading it in and seeing what we could get for it. I had already looked up online with some car payment calculators and the Kelly Blue Book that indicated we could afford the payments on something that was in the neighborhood of $14,000 assuming we got at least the bottom trade-in value for the Saturn and didn’t get stiffed on the APR. So as we payed for lunch and walked back across the street toward the carwash place, we decided we still had some time before we picked up the Civic—maybe it was time to start shopping.
An Exhausting Experience
The first place we stopped was the Toyota dealership that also ran the carwash/detail joint. We were rushed the moment we exited the Saturn by a thin blonde woman in maybe her early thirties. She smiled and showed a row of badly crooked and unevenly spaced tiny teeth and spoke with a ridiculously thick Russian accent, reminding me of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. I suppressed the urge to implore her to say, “Moose and Squirrel.”
I could tell Nikki didn’t like the woman (whose name I never quite understood so took to calling her “Svetlana” whenever she wasn’t around), which was probably due to the fact that minus the bad teeth, excessive makeup, poor wardrobe choices and pushy, car-salesman demeanor she might have been reasonably attractive and anyone with two brain cells to bang together could tell that she used her appearance to help her with her job. It wasn’t going to work in my case, but she pushed the angle anyway especially once she found out that it was I who would be the interested party in this case and not Nik.
My general attitude toward car salespeople is similar to my attitude toward roaches: I’m sure somewhere in the grand scheme of things they serve some purpose but I’m at a loss to distinguish what it is and in the meantime they just really repulse me. So Svetlana grated on me as she showed me a couple of trucks, most of them out of my price range. She did have a Chevy Colorado in white with a manual transmission that I took out for a test drive. It was okay, but it didn’t really have a lot of power behind it and I could tell that Nikki wasn’t impressed; whether that was a by-product of her distaste for Svetlana or something about the truck, I couldn’t tell.
I informed Svetlana and the manager she brought over to badger me into “running the numbers”—which is code for giving the über-high pressure sell routine—that I wasn’t going to talk numbers with anyone until I had done a lot more shopping. The manager told me something that I was peripherally aware of but was funny to hear said right out loud; he said it was nearing the end of the month and sales staff were under the screws to get their quotas met and he’d do practically anything to get me into a deal that very second. I politely declined and said I would return if nothing else came from my continued searching.
As we left Nik got a call from Honda saying our car was ready. So I dropped her off at the service center and went around front to see what they had in the way of used trucks.
My desires in a truck were pretty minimal: I would like some sort of extra cab room but I would certainly be happy with a standard cab if everything else was good. I preferred a bed liner already installed but I like the spray-on kind better than the drop-ins and those can be harder to find, so no bed liner was okay too. I prefer non-automatic gizmos: I share my father’s distaste for automatic windows and “power seats” seem like a really stupid feature to me unless they have the seat memory feature typically available only in really high end luxury vehicles. The only real mandatories I had were Air Conditioning (I live in California’s Central Valley so that’s a deal breaker if not available) and cloth seats: I hate leather, probably a by-product from too many burned tushes and a sour experience with our leather sofa. The main decision-making factor: I have to like the truck. It’s a tenuous requirement, sure, but it helped in a way because I wasn’t easily swayed by fancy extras the salespeople kept trying to push on me.
The Honda guy showed me a couple of Chevy Silverados, also in white. One was too new, too big and too loaded to even come close to my price range so I dismissed it outright. The other was better in terms of price and had some nice features (although it did have the stupid power windows). It also had a camper shell which I wasn’t crazy about, since I don’t have a place to store such a monstrosity and I wouldn’t use it anyway, making it just one more thing I’d have to try to sell off. It also had a dead battery when I first looked at it so they sent a service guy out with the jumper cart to give it a boost and I hopped in for a test drive.
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