The city I live in has extremely inflated vehicle values compared to the surrounding areas. If you buy the same car from a neighboring state, you can often save $3–4k without really trying. When I buy a new vehicle (which happens every three to four years), I always look in the surrounding states to compare pricing.
I was shopping for a new car (brand new) and found one that matched my specs about twelve hours away in a neighboring state. It was priced about $5,000 below comps.
After looking up flights, there was a one-way direct flight that took me to their local airport for around $175. Plus, the gas to drive back, I was looking at a total of maybe $275 to save $5,000. Absolutely worth it in this situation.
I reached out to the dealership, negotiated a bit, and agreed on a price. I let them know that I would be flying in to pick up the car and offered to pay in full in advance of the flight. They told me that all they needed was a $1k deposit and that the car was considered mine.
We signed a contract, and I paid the deposit.
And then I booked the flight for three days later.
First sign of things gone awry:
When I showed up at the airport, the dealership was supposed to pick me up. This had been arranged in advance. A quick phone call later, I grabbed an Uber to take me the twenty miles to the dealership, with the promise of them covering that cost. No big deal either way.
Second sign of things gone awry:
When I showed up at the dealership, the salesman I had been speaking with asked me if I wanted to walk the lot with him to look at a few cars.
Yes. Cars. Plural.
Questioning what he meant by that, we walked into the lot to see these “cars” he was talking about.
Were these some special type of gold-inlaid, full self-driving, full self-flying amaze-mobiles? No. They were not.
When I asked point-blank to see the car I was buying, the one with VIN XYZ listed in the signed contract with a deposit on it, I was told it was no longer available.
The salesman offered to show me similar cars, which would have been fine if we could have come to similar pricing terms. But all of these cars were outrageously priced (think $2k over MSRP instead of $5k under MSRP).
There was never any mention, paperwork, signage, or otherwise, of incentives for giving five-star reviews.)
Fast forward two to three hours.
I was now convinced the dealership never had this specific car on the lot and that this was a 100% bait-and-switch gone wrong. The dealership was unwilling to sell me a similar vehicle at a similar price (we were over $5k apart) and unwilling to pay my flight costs for this scenario.
A heated discussion ensued between the general manager and me, who told me:
General Manager: “Go ahead and leave a bad review.”
He also made it clear I wasn’t getting any “free” money from him. I took an Uber to a nearby hotel and booked a flight home for the next day.
Total cost: Around $750.
This dealership had an average Google rating of around 4.5 stars with about four-hundred total reviews. Pretty solid for a dealership.
That night, sitting in the hotel room with time to burn, I spent a couple of hours creating new email accounts so I could leave multiple reviews. By the end of the night, I had left around twenty one-star reviews. Then I stopped caring about the reviews and shifted my focus to recovering my travel expenses.
A few days after getting home, I sent the dealership a demand letter for $750, which they ignored. Since the original contract was executed in both states, I was allowed to file small claims in my home state, which I did.
The dealership never showed up. I received a default judgment for $750. I got my $1k deposit back. I paid with a credit card, and it was refunded without issue. I couldn’t sue for time spent or force the contract to be honored because I filed in small claims court (the case was winnable, but legal fees and time made it not worth pursuing).
It took certified letters, phone calls, and about a year, but yes, I collected.
I was still not a happy camper. What they did was wrong on so many levels. All my friends knew the story. Many left a bad review or two, but nothing out of the ordinary.
At some point later, I left one bad review. Just one. I noticed all the original reviews I had left earlier were gone, likely flagged as fake. The one I just posted stayed. So, the next day, I created another account and left another one-star review.
Fast forward two to three years. This became a habit. Any time I had a few minutes, I created a new account and left a one-star review.
Their current rating: 1.9 stars. Total reviews: Nearly 3,500. I am personally responsible for at least half of them.
When you open the dealer’s website, one of the rotating banners advertises:
Website Banner: “$50 for a five-star review.”
It explains that if you show the review to your salesman, you get a $50 Visa gift card. This policy appeared around a year after the bait-and-switch, right when the one-star reviews began piling up.
Assuming I’m responsible for half the reviews, and they’ve paid for at least a thousand five-star reviews, they’ve spent $50,000 buying reviews.
And their rating still keeps dropping. All after telling me to “go ahead and leave a bad review.”
