[masraum]

Yesterday we bought a used car. It was a CPO car at a place that said "we don't haggle." The car is unusual due to having the larger 6 cyl motor vs the standard 4 cyl. There were only a few in Houston, and only a couple that were some color other than white and black. This particular car was about $1500 less expensive than the other two, and fortunately, it was the color that the missus (and I) liked the best.

When we were purchasing, we did advise that we had our own financing.

When I got the sheet that itemized the various items (vehicle, tax, tag, etc....) it included a "reconditioning fee" of nearly 5% of the cost of the vehicle. That had not previously been mentioned and caught me off guard.

"Well, we have to recondition the car to ensure that it's in great shape."

My thought was "yes, that goes without saying and is part of the process for every car and every used car dealer, but I've never seen or heard of that being charged separately before today."

I was not happy, and knew that the missus would be livid (she was at home watching the grandkids). I advised her, she said "what, no, we'll get a different car."

The end result, they ended up waving the reconditioning fee completely. The missus was still livid and only just barely agreed that she'd be OK with getting the car.

Have any of you ever heard of a dealer charging a "reconditioning fee" or "dealer assessed fee" on top of a car?

I get it, they can advertise a lower price. Many/most folks probably either won't notice the extra fee when they sign or they'll just eat it if they do notice.

After they waved the fee, they pushed extra hard to have us use their financing.

I'd love to know if the reconditioning fee is applied to all used cars from that dealer or if they were just trying to recoup some profit from us since they'd already agreed to fix some scratches on the passenger's side for us (how reconditioned could it have been?) and we were getting $250 credit towards accessories due to some sort of sale (applied to installation of a trailer hitch) and we weren't using their financing.

I remember reading an article that was posted here years ago, where a journalist went and worked at a few dealers, one was a no haggle dealership and another was a regular dealership. He then wrote a long article about the business and how they try to make money. (ie, you negotiate the cost of the vehicle, then they make up their "loss" in the financing or you negotiate payment/financing then they make up by not negotiating on the vehicle cost as much).

The good news is that the salesman wasn't high pressure and was a really nice guy. He was super busy with another customer and had to hand off the paperwork portion of the purchase to another guy who was also very personable. One of the other cars that we looked at involved a salesman that was a traditional smarmy guy. Anything that I asked him about the car was "oh, yes, it's got that feature, best of the best, fully loaded, safest car ever." I stopped asking him questions because he didn't know the answers of any of the questions that I asked and tried to feed me BS instead.