HOW MUCH?
I find it difficult to understand how a car dealer can offer me, and anyone else, “over four thousand dollars” back, if I agree to buy one the cars he sells.
He must have a dependable stock of money which allows him to make such and offer, which he, himself, terms as being a “generous”one. I have never been a real threat to any sixth grade math student, but I do add and subtract well enough to realize that he is talking nonsense. He is a person whom the American Indians warned us of years ago.
We might easily become skewered on his “forked tongue” if we head his message for rush right down to buy a car while we can get this fine rebate. The amount of money he says he will return to you, we find, makes reference only to your cash purchase of the most expensive model expensive model of the finest car he can offer, If he kept one in stock in his showrooms, he could show it to you. The price tag on such a unit is astronomical and he could well afford to discount up to four thousand dollars and still make his well-known “killin'”. You find that the refund on the smaller, less-padded, crummier, maintenance-prone model you want to buy brings his “generous” offer:down to around $2.37 cent a week for two weeks, unless you buy a special Service Package he has available just for you, your refund can be goosed a bit up to the double digest area.
It's the old “bait and switch” con routine under a slightly different guise, and its continued on the v-screen, on the radio waves and in print.
If you listen carefully, read with intense suspicion and have a short of double vision to see through glamorous settings and dancing dollars, you can avoid much of the heartache and, possibly years of financial servitude.
When someone offers me a sum back, I have a deep feeling that is almost the exact overcharge he would otherwise be making on my purchase, or those of others, if he had not been so overcome by his sense community responsibilities and of fairness in his business whatever the product may be.
I question refunds, rebates, and other forms of inducement gimmicks.
A.L.M. February 26, 2004 [c402wds]
