Head's Up-Portsmouth Ford, Portsmouth NH

harmanrk wrote:

SidecarFlip wrote:
Being a Ford employee family (us), we never have had any issue with purchasing a new vehicle from any Ford dealer. Don't even haggle. It's employee pricing period.

Your dealer loves to hear that. No haggle to even try to do better on the price, fish in a barrel. They can go lower then employee pricing. They CAN go lower than invoice too....

Of course, everybody knows they can sell below invoice and still make a profit; it's called dealer holdback.

For some people the Costo method, employee discount method, etc, is a less stressful way to go. You get a decent deal, not ripped off, even though you did not squeeze every last dime out of the dealer.

My philosophy is to always know the dealer invoice cost, ie, what the dealer paid for the vehicle. Dealer hold back is not included so there is some wiggle room for them even if they sell at invoice.

If you know the dealer invoice, you can roughly judge if you're getting a decent deal. Some models that are in hot demand might command a price over invoice, such as the $500 OVER invoice I paid for my Tundra back in 2008; They just came out, nobody was dealing and that was the best I could do on that truck at that time. I actually had another dealer turn down the $500 over invoice I was willing to pay.

Another example is when we bought the wife's Chevy Traverse; we used the Costco buying plan for the first time. Dealer opened up his Costco book and showed me the Traverse was to be sold at $700 BELOW invoice. I knew the invoice price so we made the deal. $1500 cash back from Chevy at the time made the deal even better.

Don't know if it's exactly true but the sales manager told me dealer hold back on the Traverse was $1500 so they basically made $800 profit on the deal, just for doing the paperwork.