Drove several hours out of my way to test drive a beautiful used 2017 car with 5k miles advertised at a great price. (23,979) Sat down with them to buy the car and they pulled the most absurd attempt of extortion I have ever seen and they tried to tack on the following:
$2600 dollar '50/50' reconditioning fee
$499 doc fee by far the highest I have EVER encountered.
$210 'laser etching' People still fall for this gimmick?
So a total of $3,309 dollars in hidden fine print 'gotchas' 13.7% of the purchase price in undisclosed fees. Highway. Robbery.
Here is the bottom line if your dealership does not want to sale a car for 23.9k DO NOT advertise it at that price. This game of thousands of dollars of hidden fees after going out of your way to arrive on the lot is old, and modern customers are sick and tired of it.
They started to back off the fee's our salesman even tried to kick out the reconditioning fee entirely but a manager quickly stepped in and got huffy puffy pen slamming tough guy with us, refusing to drop the reconditioning fee below $895, refusing to budge on the overpriced and unrequested laser etching , and scoffing at our pleas to come back with a better APR.Folks I have unsecured cash loans for better APR rates than what they were trying to pitch me.
I avoid the back alley single wide type of used car dealerships where this type of behavior is common, I thought I would have been treated better at this location, but I will be steering clear of Sands in the future.