Our Weekend…Car shopping
We spent a fair amount of time car shopping this weekend. Luckily it went better than our first night of car shopping on Wednesday.
We picked a place that is known for no haggling – they set a price and that’s the price (hint, the name of the place is BlankMax). We “lucked” into getting this older guy, John, who pretty much pretended like I didn’t exist and only spoke to Lo. Meanwhile, I’m the one who has been doing more of the research and had a list of their cars on my phone that we wanted to check out. I would ask a question and he would turn his whole body towards Lo to answer my question, without ever looking at me. It happened immediately and we probably should have just left, but we wanted to sit in some of the cars to try to narrow down our options based on size/comfort. I had to repeat myself several times about which cars we wanted to see and he would pretty much ignore me until Lo said we wanted to see a particular model. But we made him go out in the slushy cold weather and show us some cars anyway, knowing that we would never buy from him – he definitely deserved that. After we buy a car, I intend to write to the dealership and let them know why we didn’t buy from him. I’m going to wait until after, because we aren’t ruling out the dealership entirely, just John. But I think they need to know that they have a guy on staff who treats women like they are invisible if they are with a man. I really wanted to say “my dad built cars for a living and rebuilds classic cars as a hobby, so please speak to ME about cars”. But I don’t actually know a ton about cars, so I didn’t want to over-inflate my knowledge. Plus my dad has been known to keep a peanut butter jar of nuts and bolts under the hood of cars for quick fixes. Just kidding…he accidentally left a jar of nuts and bolts under the hood of my sister’s car. She was pretty embarrassed when someone was doing something under the hood of her car and found it.
Friday night was fairly low key. We met our friend for dinner at Liberty Tavern and then headed home to watch TV.
We went to a couple of other dealerships on Saturday and Sunday and had good experiences. The salesmen treated me like a human. We narrowed down some of our options, but unfortunately not enough. We’re still deciding between a Jetta, Sonata, Galant, Altima, Chrysler 200, and Mazda 6. Yes, that’s the narrowed down version. We ruled out Camry (A pillars (windshield supports) restrict view), Accord (not enough leg room for Lo), Malibu (not enough headroom), and Avenger (poor view out rear side windows).
Other than that, Lo’s sister, BIL, niece Sadie, and niece puppy Shorty came to stay with us on Saturday night. The dogs met for the first time. Boof loved Shorty and wanted to play, but Shorty was mostly terrified of Boof and wanted nothing to do with her. To be fair, Boof is 30 lbs, Shorty is 6 or 7 lbs. We went to dinner at Cinco de Mayo – our favorite Mexican place, and just hung out at home for the rest of the night. They have one of the best babies ever. She is so easy-going and smiley. I can’t believe I didn’t take any pictures! Blame it on the margaritas. But here’s an adorable one from Christmas.
As for the cars, does anyone have any suggestions?