I HATE Lithia Motors in Billings

“Studies show that a satisfied customer will tell 2-3 people about his experience with your company. A dissatisfied consumer will share their lament with 8-10 people and some will push that number to twenty.” – Susan Gladin “How Customer Service Works” (http://money.howstuffworks.com/customer-service2.htm)

I am not a satisfied customer. I am writing to “share my lament”. I’ll admit up front. This is no warning. This is no public service. This is public shaming pure and simple. Hey’ they wasted my day yesterday and they appeared to be trying to rip me off so they totally deserve it!

It started a week ago when I decided it was nearing time to replace my 19-year-old SUV. I had done some research using USAA’s car buying service and found a 2007 Subaru Outback for sale at Lithia Chrysler etc. in Billings. I checked the Carfax report on the vehicle and found no problems. I checked two different pricing services and found that the asking price of just under $10000 was reasonable but not too good to be true. I called the dealership and inquired about the vehicle and said I’d probably be down on Friday. Lithia Called on Thursday evening to confirm I was coming, confirm that the car was still there and even set an appointment time with me for 10 am.

When I arrived at the dealership on Friday after the 150 mile drive from Miles City (yeah, we are, in fact, getting to the good part) I met with the receptionist who, after a couple of minutes, was able to find the woman in Internet Sales with whom I made the appointment. As promised, she introduced me to a sales person. He asks what I’m here for, looks something up on his screen and begins to hem and haw “…that car’s not ready…I’m not sure we’re even selling it…” (NOTE: According to the Carfax report, the car had been listed for sale since December 12. Yesterday when I looked at it was January 17. The car had been listed for 35 days and supposedly nobody had gotten around to prepping it for sale.)

Then, the other shoe drops…”it has a bit of hail damage”. Yup! It hadn’t occurred to anyone in the last 35 days that the ad should possibly have mentioned hail damage. It didn’t occur to Pam in Internet Sales that, perhaps I might need to know that it was a hail damaged POS before making a 150 mile drive to Billings to view and test drive this car.

I wanted to see it anyway. I had just driven two and a half hours and 150 miles for this moment, I was not going to be denied.  Bryan, the salesman, led me all around the parking lot looking for it. We couldn’t find it. Then he left me waiting inside the dealership for several more minutes while he and a person from the Service department looked some more.

Finally, about a half an hour after agreeing to show it to me, Bryan arrived with the Outback – or as I like to call it - the bait-and-switch-mobile. Now there weren’t as many hail-pock-marks as I had feared. On the other hand, the finish on the car was terribly weathered and the hood did not appear to completely close. There had been no attempt to detail it and it even had trash in the front passenger seat. It really appeared that they were not even remotely serious about selling this car for what it was actually worth. I’m guessing it was there to get folks into the dealership so they could be upsold…upsold to more car than they needed…upsold to a car whose value they had not researched…upsold to a car for which they had not pre-arranged financing (and with which the dealer could play financing games).

Yes, I should have left right then. Wait, who am I kidding? I should have left about 40 minutes earlier when I was informed that the car for which I had driven 150 miles and made an appointment to see was not ready, possibly not for sale and had undisclosed hail damage. But I had invested so much time to get here anyway. And Bryan had what sounded like an interesting idea…

“There’s a 2007 Impreza listed at Lithia Toyota – would you be interested in that?” Actually I was very interested to hear what this guy had to say about Lithia Toyota’s Impreza. This was the car I was most interested in as I did my research in the previous week. I was told before the previous weekend that it was not ready to show (a theme here?). I kept in contact with Lithia Toyota’s internet sales person who said she’d find out Monday when it would be ready. On Monday or Tuesday of last week,, then let me know it would be ready to show on Thursday. I replied that I would be in to see in on Friday.

I wanted to call on Thursday night to let her know I was still interested in that car. I had to look up the ad to find her phone number on the internet. The ad showed the car’s price had been raised from 9995 to 10795. Luckily I had my USAA price guarantee printed out somewhere. I called her cell – no answer. I called her desk – no answer. I called the receptionist and she tells me that the car has sold to a woman who had never seen it – or even a picture of it. I was irritated that the internet sales woman did not call me back as a courtesy to let me know this. I was suspicious that maybe they did not want me to make an offer on the car with a “guaranteed price” that was now lower than they wanted. I was kicking myself for not making a sight-unseen offer on this car (at least the hail damage incident at Lithia Chrysler had cured me of that). I was quite curious what Bryan would be told about the Impreza.

So I told Bryan to make the call, thinking he would simply turn to the telephone right at the desk where he was sitting and get a possibly new story on the Impreza. Oh, good God, of course not!. Bryan, instead, left his desk and retreated to an “Employees Only” room that I would later learn is known in auto dealer circles as “The Tower”.

He spent several minutes in there making what seemed to me should have been a 1 to 2 minute phone call that he could have made at his desk. I was growing impatient. I could see the impatience on my face in the mirrors next to the “Employees Only” door through which Bryan had exited. Mirrors? Wait. Those weren’t mirrors. They were one-way glass panes!  I (along with the other customers in the showroom) was being watched. All of us customers in the showroom were like “perps” in the interview room on “The Closer” being spied upon by the salesmen and sales managers.

Like those criminals I was a bit uncomfortable with possibly being watched. Unlike the crooks on The Closer, I was, mercifully, not handcuffed to the table. I rose from my chair and moved toward a wall where I would be harder to see from the confines of The Tower. Bryan made an impeccably timed emergence from the room with an update. “My Manager is calling them right now.” I acted like this was utterly normal…like there was nothing wrong with sitting around waiting 10 to 15 minutes for his manager to make a call that Bryan himself could have completed in a couple of minutes at his desk. He retreated back to The Tower and I waited some more. Bryan reappeared and informed me that the Impreza had sold.

He told me about a Subaru Legacy that was also available at Lithia Toyota. He would be able to retrieve it in 10 minutes. Against my better judgment, I stayed. I had come all this way. And that “new-to-me car fever” that Bryan and the other staff were sensing on me? Well, they weren’t just imagining it.

I was left alone and returned to my car to make a call to USAA. I have been a member of USAA for nearly 35 years (my Dad served in Korea) and they had a great reputation. I figured they should know it was being tarnished by their car-buying service’s designation of Lithia as a “certified dealer”. I heard a knock at my window. It was Pam, the Internet Sales woman. I rolled down my window and she asked how it was going. I explained I was waiting to see another car and was just in the car to make a phone call. I also explained that I was very disappointed to have made this trip to see the original Outback and had not been told of its hail-damaged condition. She apologized – the sort of apology I would expect if she offered to bring me Coke Zero and brought a can of Diet Coke instead. Any sense of how badly I must have been put out to come a long distance to see this car was probably swirling in the same sewer where she and the rest of the sales force at Lithia Motors had thrown away their consciences.

A couple of minutes later, Bryan returned with the Legacy. It was priced $3000 more than the car I had come down to see. It might have even been worth the price. The thought, however, of doing a $13,000 transaction with these people made me throw up in my mouth a little. I told him “Sorry but this just isn’t the car I did the research on.” I climbed back into my 19-year-old Explorer and drove away.