Seattle Area Purchase in February
Don't know where your dad is located, but the spouse and I spent time at both Michael's in Bellevue and Toyota of Kirkland, east of Seattle. This was in February, so the info is maybe a bit out of date at this point. Anyhow, we first spent (or mispent) an afternoon at Michael's and ended up finally pinning down a price for a silver TE with KDSS. No such vehicle in stock, but they thought that maybe one would show up "before too long". Meanwhile, they wanted us to put down a $500 "commitment" and we would get the first one that showed up. Don't remember the final price - it was supposed to be Invoice + $500, but since we couldn't find out the invoice price, that didn't really mean anything, now did it? Discussed what would happen if e.g. on the ship the brake master cylinder leaked and puked brake fluid all over the place, or the wiring shorted out and fried part of the wiring, or whatever. They would fix up everything just like new and we would love it, even if we had 1/2 of a new wiring harness spliced into the original. Wrong. We could keep looking at vehicles as they showed up and when we found one we were happy with we could take it. We were reluctant to commit the $500, and then they hit us with an itemized list, for no readily apparent reason, of their expenses for which we owed them. And I'm not making this up:
Per unit overhead (real estate costs, administrative costs, hourly employees, water, sewer, garbage, electricity, gasoline, maintenance, printing, insurance, etc) - $470.00
State business tax - $178.91
Advertising (new advertising dollars divided by vehicles sold per month) - $360.00
Min commissions (pays 5 people) - $485.00
Interest (monthly cost to floor the vehicle) - $202.77
Vehicle Lot Maintenance (lot attendants, car cleaning supplies, lot damage, etc) - $209.00
Normally, this would all just be considered as part of the cost of doing business, but they apparently wanted to rub our noses in it. We hinted, tongue only slightly in cheek, that we have expenses too and would like an attendant reduction in the price of the car to cover our living expenses. They weren't buying it.
Then before agreeing to the $500 deposit, we noticed the list of option codes, which included the code for running boards. We had told them right from the start that we DID NOT want running boards, but there they were - for $540 or whatever it was. They said that the service department would be happy to take them off for us for free, but we would still be stuck with them even thought we did not want them and had not asked for them - the salesman said that we could just sell them on e-bay. Yes, I'm dead serious - remarkably enough that's exactly what he told us. We were told that the "current build pattern" for TE's included running boards, and consequently we would not find any new TE's for sale anywhere in the US without running boards. At this point we walked out with the salesman trailing us to the door, after we had wasted our afternoon going around in circles with them. The salesman told us that we had wasted his time and was quite upset that we were walking out. No squat, Sherlock.
So on we went to Toyota of Kirkland. They might be able to do a dealer trade for a silver TE with KDSS. Got a call a few days later, and it was silver, had KDSS, no running boards, $225 worth of fancy-schmantsy carpeted floor mats, and $1000 worth of Nav and upgraded audio. The vehicle was actually initially delivered to Toyota of Tacoma. Told them did not want the Nav/audio, and certainly were not going to pay $225 for carpeted floor mats only to throw them away when getting the WeatherTech mats or whatever. So let's take the $225 and the $1000 right off the top. Got a fair enough trade-in on our late and lamented 2002 Mazda Tribute. The sticker started us out at the exact same $40,535 that you quoted. With some back and forth, we got it down to $33,000 with the trade, and we didn't tell them we were paying cash till after the price had been agreed on. I think we got $6,000 for the Mazda, so what it amounts to is that we got the Nav/audio for "free", plus $535 off of MSRP on top of that - and kept the carpeted floor mats to boot for trade-in time down the road. At that time, TE's were touted as rare and hard to find, and we were in a buying mood, so we just did it. Jimmy Fox, our salesman, was a good guy to deal with, but by and large the sales people really were uninformed about all the TE bells and whistles. Our somewhat checkered service department saga continues, but the "buying experience" was probably a 7 or 8 out of 10, just due to the general lack of BS.
Hope that at least some of this helps. Good luck.
