I have never seen such pushy sales staff as I had at Don Brown Chevrolet. It was like they hadn't sold a car in a few months or something!
My wife had finally had enough of my ugly car (I had an old 1983 Volvo diesel with 350,000 + miles on it that looked like it was about to fall apart – It probably had far more miles on it but the odometer stopped working eight years ago) and so she told me to get rid of it and get a newer car and I couldn’t come home until I had done this. I guess it’s kind like the ultimate ultimatum.
So I ended up going first to Don Brown Chevrolet on Kingshighway here in St. Louis Missouri. When I got there I was greeted almost immediately by a Ronald Thompson. He seemed a little overly nice and a little too hyper or pushy for my likings. I felt like I was cattle being steered. The test drive was definitely not long enough and I felt like I wasn’t allowed any time by myself to think.
Then when we got inside the car dealership it seemed to get worse. I met the manager, Mr. Macintosh, and I felt I was being tag-teamed between the two of them. I was a customer just starting their car search and wasn’t quite ready to make a purchase yet. The salesperson and the manager were basically trying to cram the first car had seen and driven down my throat.
I told him numerous times that I just started looking at cars and this was the first car dealership I had visited. I told him that I was going to go and look at several cars from different manufacturers and at several different car dealerships to find the one that I wanted. When I buy a car, as you can tell from my 1983 Volvo diesel I tend to keep them and drive them until they fall apart or until my wife makes me get rid of them.
Regardless of what I said the manager in the salesperson kept coming back and forth with numbers on a car that I wasn’t really in love with. When they found that that wasn’t working with me they then brought in another manager, a Mr. Stolle (I’m not sure about the spelling here). They tried to get me away from sales price and I wasn’t interested in trading in my car because the old Volvo was going to be given to my mail lady whom always told my wife that she wanted it for her son to fix up if I didn’t want it anymore, besides, I am sure it doesn’t have much value if any at all for trading in on a newer car.
The terminology these three were using was that this was a great investment in getting this new Chevy Malibu. They told me over and over again that I would not need to be paying high bills for maintenance as I probably was doing with my Volvo. Quite the contrary, the old Volvo diesel would just keep running and running and had very, very minimal maintenance costs. One of the things that I loved about my Volvo was that years back I had converted it so it could also run off of oil or grease from fast food restaurants.
Being that there is a plethora of fast food restaurants here in St. Louis and in the nearby areas I basically had free fuel for years. So I didn’t even have to worry about paying three dollars or whatever a gallon for diesel at the pump. Now with this new car they were trying to cram down my throat here at Don Brown Chevrolet, this would no longer be the case. And their calling it an investment due to the supposedly reduced maintenance costs would be greatly overshadowed by the fuel costs that I would now have to pay.
Plus they never took into account the fact that when you buy a new vehicle you have to carry collision insurance. When I told them that I currently did not carry collision insurance and that this would be a major factor in the car that I purchase they told me that it was barely anything or insignificant. This is a lie because if you call any car insurance company up to get a quote and you want the difference between collision and non-collision coverage you will see a difference of thousands of dollars.
So there was no great investment here. They also saw me as an old fuddy-duddy and thought that I didn’t know what was going on in the car buying process and so they started with the full sticker price on the vehicle and didn’t really want to come off of that. Instead they tried to veer me into what my payments would be. The manager and the salesperson kept saying over and over again that the price of the car meant nothing and what was really important was what the payments were and the down payment. That might be true for some people but I wasn’t looking to get a car loan here. I paid cash for my last car and I’ll pay cash again for this car.
Finally I had enough of their pushiness and told him I had run out of patience and time and I had to leave. They try to do everything they could get me to stay, but I had had it up to my neck with their lies and pushiness so regardless of what they said I left. I took a few days off to clear my head from its herbal treatment I got at Don Brown Chevrolet and no my wife did not throw me out of the house – she was happy as long as I was in the car buying process. I ended up going to Bommarito Chevrolet On Lindbergh Blvd. which is only a few miles away and ended up buying a used Acura RL there.
I got treated far better by the staff at Bommarito Chevrolet and ended up with a car that I’m far happier with. Matter fact I love this car. It has so many features and options I don’t even know what to do with some of them but they look really neat. My wife loves the car and she actually goes on rides with me now – she would never do that in the old Volvo (she said the Volvo smelled like french fries as it drove down the street).
after reading this review I think it say a lot about the kind of person that you are.since old grease and oil is sold to recylers and not free as you say unless you are stealing it. One must question the validity anr truth of this review.