How? Like, they order a certain number of cars from the dealership--do they just trickle in randomly? Do they forget to log sales? I get misplacing where the car is, but whether it is?
Granted, I have friends who work at rental-car companies, and the level of shitshow they aspire to is truly inspiring.
I can verify that this happened to me last year. The dealer could not positively affirm that they did or did not have a particular model in their inventory, so the salesman and I wandered around the lot for ten minutes before deciding they did not.
I told him, "okay, well if you do get any in, call me up so I can come over and buy one." Easiest sale ever. Well, that didn't happen, and my assumption is that they just don't know what they have from day to day.
The thing is the car does probably exist somewhere - but it may be in their system, but allocated to someone (on paper only, because if they allocate it in the system it disappears from the website, but they want you to come in), or in transit (they appear on the website the moment the factory assigns a VIN build to the dealer, etc.
And sometimes I swear it's just a glitch and they don't really care.
In my case it wasn't that: The dealer straight up imagined a sale they wanted to have, and were quite rude to me.
Me: "I want to buy one of the cars you advertised in the newspaper." (It was 2003)
Them: "We don't have those cars."
Me: "But you're advertising this sale."
Them: Poker face.
It wasn't like they said, "Oh, yeah, that was a popular sale and they sold out." It was very clear they advertised cars they didn't have so they could divert me to a more expensive model, and it wasn't like they offered to call another dealer to ask if they still had inventory.
>And I get that some of the walking around is probably a ruse
I don't doubt that on a slow day a salesperson and the entire process will be slowed down... nothing like tapping into the sunk cost fallacy (as a buyer I spent 3 hours here today, I'm not walking out now and doing THIS again)!
How? Like, they order a certain number of cars from the dealership--do they just trickle in randomly? Do they forget to log sales? I get misplacing where the car is, but whether it is?
Granted, I have friends who work at rental-car companies, and the level of shitshow they aspire to is truly inspiring.