29th of September 2006

It seems that discrimination against women in the auto industry is just as rampant as ever.

Some time ago now, the CBS programme 60 Minutes, ran an item wherein they sent two of their producers into a dealership.

One was a man and the other was a woman.

The woman went in first with a camcorder hidden in her briefcase. After much bargaining, she finally was able to obtain a fixed
price for a certain model of car.

A while later, the male producer went into the same dealership and his STARTING price, before any bargaining began, was better
than the best price the female producer had been able to obtain after two hours of intensive discussion.

Naturally, 60 Minutes went back into the dealership and confronted the sales manager with the video of both negotiations.
The manager said something along the lines of "We need to have a larger profit margin when selling to women, because they're
so much more trouble when they come into the service department".

Another example is a personal one for me in which a lady came to us complaining that her almost new car was very difficult to shift.
The manual gearbox wouldn't go into first gear and second gear was also difficult without the age old technique of double de-clutching.
She then showed me no-charge invoices from the dealer with such remarks as
"This lady must have short legs" and
"This lady needs to learn how to drive".

But something was definitely amiss inside the gearbox, so I referred to another dealership that customers had told me were very
good to deal with. This dealership installed a new gearbox under warranty no questions asked.

This week comes another example of the same sort of discrimination.

A regular customer of mine is looking for a late model used car. She went to a local dealership and found one that suited her, but
was told that a test drive was not available(?).

However, after much discussion, she was given "The very best price we can possibly afford to sell this vehicle for".

The car had a strange and distinctive abrasion on the rear bumper which she had noted when discussing preparation of the car for
delivery. Two days later, she saw a (male) tenant in her apartment block drive into the underground garage with the very same car.

Out of curiosity, she asked the man what he had paid for the car.

The answer was about $3000 less than "The very best price we can possibly afford to sell this vehicle for".

Infuriated at the obvious sexual discrimination, she phoned the salesman involved and berated him about his misogyny.

No apology, just an offer to "Come back in and we'll see if we can do better next time". In your dreams, buddy!

We find lady clients very much easier to deal with than men. They drive their cars all the time and know when something is not right.
Once they trust you, they will accept your analysis and rarely try to bargain price.

Men, on the other hand, already know what the problem is. (All the lights just when out, so I must have blown a fuse, right?)
They know how much it's going to cost to repair and when you call back to tell them that their amateur analysis was way off base,
start to imply that we're either simpletons, dishonest or just incompetent.

Not all men and not all women behave this way, but if I had to choose one gender only to serve, I think it might have to be the ladies.
Because they're obviously still having a bad time out there in the shark pool world of car buying and repair.