Earl Stewart on Cars - 09.25.2021 - Your Calls, Texts, and Mystery Shop of Smail Mazda of Greensburg, PA.

Episode Date: September 25, 2021

Earl and his team answer various caller questions and responds to incoming text messages. Earl’s female mystery shopper, Agent Lightning travels over 1000 miles to visit Smail Mazda in the Pittsburgh Pennsylvania area to see how the shopping experience will be at their dealership for a new 2021 Mazda3 sedan. Earl Stewart is the owner of Earl Stewart Toyota in North Palm Beach, Florida, one of the largest Toyota dealerships in the southeastern U.S. He is also a consumer advocate who shares his knowledge spanning 50+ years about the car industry through a weekly newspaper column and radio show. Each week Earl provides his audience with valuable tips that prevent them from "getting ripped off by a car dealer". Earl has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, Business Week, and other major publications. He has also made numerous appearances on CNN, Fox News, CBS, and other news networks. He is frequently called upon by local and national media to comment on major trends and newsworthy events occurring in today’s rapidly changing auto industry. You can learn more by going to Earl's videos on www.youtube.com/earloncars, subscribing to his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/earloncars, his tweets at www.twitter.com/earloncars, and reading his blog posts at www.earloncars.com. Sign up to become one of Earl's Vigilantes and help others in your community to avoid getting ripped off by a car dealer. Go to www.earlsvigilantes.com for more information. “Disclosure: Earl Stewart is a Toyota dealer and directly and indirectly competes with the subjects of the Mystery Shopping Reports. He honestly and accurately reports the experiences of the shoppers and does not influence their findings. As a matter of fact, based on the results of the many Mystery Shopping Reports he has conducted, there are more dealers on the Recommended Dealer List than on the Not Recommended List he maintains on www.GoodDealerBadDealerList.com”

Good morning. I'm Earl Stewart. I welcome you to Earl Stewart on Cars, a live talk show all about how to buy, lease, maintain, or repair your car without being ripped off by a car dealer. With me in the studio is Nancy Stewart, my wife, co-host, and a strong consumer advocate, especially for our female business. We also have Rick Kearney, an expert on how to keep your car running right. I dare you to ask a question that Rick can't answer about the mechanics or electronics of your car. Also with us as my son, Stu Stewart, our LinkedIn cyber. space through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Periscope. Stu is also the Spymaster Director of our Mystery Shopping Report. He dispatches our secret shopper weekly to an unsuspecting South Florida dealership. And now, on with the show.

Good morning, everybody. Why, where did the week go? Where did the month go? But we're back. And you were listening to the recorded announcement. Oh, the music went off. That's good. and some of you hear the music some of you don't

that's another show another story anyway welcome to our regular listeners we've got some folks out there that have been listening to us for years Nancy Stewart and myself pioneered this thing we call our radio show about 20 years ago and it was a little station called

Cview Radio actually the same location but different owners and different radio shows now. Sea View Radio, a half-hour show. And what do you think our audience was probably a couple dozen people if we were lucky and all of a sudden

it blossomed, it bloomed, and here we are. 21st century. And we've got ourselves a pretty good national, actually international audience. We're here to help you avoid being taken advantage of by car dealers. There's still too many of them out there

that do that sort of thing. and that's what makes the show important. Hopefully to you, it is definitely to us. We love it. You know, I hope you can sense it during the course of the shows. If you're new, you know, you can't fake happiness. I don't think. I mean, I guess you can fake it, but sooner or later,

they're going to figure it out. A lot of people pretend like they're happy. But you know people like that? They pretend like you're happy, but they're not really happy. politicians are good at that but we don't pretend well maybe a little bit here and there but

I think that you'll see that we really love what we do we get a lot of gratification we get a lot of feedback and that's really the most important part of this show is you the feedback

and we can have feedback audio on the telephone we have old-fashioned telephone number it's 877 960 9960 They've been the same number Since back 20 years ago

Two decades 877 960 909960 And we love the phone calls When they come in because they're personal They're old-fashioned But hey personal can be fun Personal can be important

And a personality You just have a whole different feeling when you're one-on-one Unfortunately the 21st century in the digital age, people are into texting and a lot of social media. A lot of video. Videos is the name of the game. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Periscope, a Periscope.

A Parasope is kind of down the tube. I keep saying it because it was one of the first very interesting videos out there. And then it kind of faded away. It's a lot of turmoil, competition out there, and social media land. So a lot of you are streaming us. If you want to just stream us on your PC, you could go to www. www.stream earleoncars.com. Pretty simple, stream earle on cars.com.

And continuing the theme of why this show, I think, is important and why it's maybe more interesting on some shows, is we like to react to you. We like to answer your questions, and we don't want to be competitive. I mean, we'll tell you if we disagree with you, but your questions are particularly interesting. and I know it's hard for you

know some of you folks to believe me when I say this I mean I've been doing this thing called the retail automobile business since 1968 and you think that I had all the answers well I don't

I get answers from you I learn on this show and Rick Kearney a guy sitting beside me he is our mechanical guy our computer guy or electronic guy I'll call him a high tech he, you know, he could take a car apart and put it back together, and at least he could. I don't know if he could do it today, but we could take it apart, but you wouldn't take the

computer apart. You wouldn't get down to the microchips, I don't think, but you would, you could probably take one out if you had to. Anyway, Rick Kearney, he's a certified diagnostic master technician, and what a source of information for you folks out there. They're getting tired of having to take your car in for repairs or afraid to take your car in for repairs. If you're going to buy a car, Then you could call us, and we love to get the calls.

Or text us at 772-497-6530, 772-497-6530, and our unique source of communication. Unique. I don't know anyone that's doing this for the purpose we use it for. There are a little blue chick, big companies out there like Adobe, and I think Amazon and I'm probably misspeaking on some of these companies, but a lot of very big companies like Google are using a source of feedback from their employees and their customers. It's called what we call anonymousfeedback.com and the web link is your anonymousfeedback.com. It goes through a scrubbing cleaning of privacy that makes it impossible to violate. So,

You can communicate this way with us, say anything you want to, ask us any question, make any comment, and we don't know who you are, where you are, anything about you. And people feel free to communicate. And we get a little bit of, occasionally we get kind of a nasty comment, but usually we just get normal comments, don't we still? I mean, we get so many on unanimous feedback, people just like it. We get people on anonymous feedback who don't even want to be anonymous.

Yeah, they give it. Right. They sign it. They give their name. So write that down. Your Anonymous Feedback.com. Now, Nancy Stewart, my co-host and co-founder of this show, she's got her computer over there, and every time you call us, she'll see it on her screen.

And we prioritize your calls at 877-960-960. Why? It's more personal, I said that earlier. And a lot of people just prefer it. And we want you to be able to communicate with us any way you want to. And that is three or four, I think we got four phone lines coming in

and so if it gets filled up, we apologize. That's the reason we try to pop them right away. So I'll interrupt myself or we'll all interrupt each other just to have your phone call come through so you don't have to wait on hold too long. So thank you for being patient.

Let me introduce Nancy Stewart to the folks who don't know her. She's very important to this show. She's a very important time. half the audience because she's the only female in the studio and she sometimes feels like the lone ranger here I guess what's a what's a female ranger? A rangeress? That was a not a politically correct statement but it's just a ranger. It's just a ranger as I like an actor used to be actresses now they're actors Nancy uh is alone as a female in this audience in this studio and she's trying

not to be alone uh with uh the audience so she's generally a very large number of faithful, regular female listeners. And she has a special offer to incentivize you, if you're female, if you're a woman out there, listen to what Nancy Stewart has to say. I'm going to turn the mic over to Nancy. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome. We so appreciate your company every Saturday morning. Why?

You're a huge part of the show, very important part of the show, and we love hearing from you as to what whichever way you'd like to get in touch with us and earlier expressed those phone numbers and different ways you can do that. This morning we have $50 for the first two new lady callers, and, well, in today's climate, the $50 can go a long way, and it's a win-win situation. We'd love to hear from you, and you're also helping me to build the platform here at Erlon cars. So take advantage of that offer. $50 for the first two new lady callers. And, oh, gosh, we have a wonderful mystery shopping report out of Greensburg, Pennsylvania. And this mystery

shopping report sort of hits home after I, well, dug deep and took a look at the family. Pesburgh girls. Took a look at the family that owns this dealership. And they have a a whole lot in common with Earl Stewart, meaning that they too went back as far as 1936, and the Mosa dealership was, I think, opened in 1968. Earl can confirm that later, but it is a mystery shopping report from Greensburg, Pennsylvania. And Agent Lightning, again, what a magnificent job she has done over and over again. makes us even more interesting is that she travels quite a bit, so she's giving us the input to these dealerships all over the United States. And, of course, can't go without mentioning

Stu and all of his work that he puts into this mystery shopping report and his eloquent writing. So stay tuned for that. Take advantage of, well, www. Your Anonymous Feedback.com. Take advantage of that, and we would love to hear from you. And don't forget Earl's vigilantes. You can join us in helping other consumers and people in your community.

Without ado, I will take it back to Earl Stewart. Well, thank you very much. And we really, I know we've got so many female callers out there that are regulars. We still are struggling to reach parity 50-50.

and we encourage you you've never called the show pick up a $50 check and you don't have to do anything other than call in and be a female and that way the more the merrier I think if I were a female

and a male world I like to go into places where I feel more comfortable I feel more comfortable where more of my kind my sex are in there if you're a female and you have other females around you it's like priming the pump So we're trying to prime the pump here to get up to 50-50 male and female.

And I'm going to start out with my son Stu Stewart, who is our spymaster general, and he has done a great job of selecting car dealerships that say something. In other words, instead of just going after all the bad guys, we're searching out. We run a Mazda theme now. that was a brilliant idea because you eliminate a lot of the variables and you compare to just the way a franchise, meaning we could have gone after Honda dealers or Chevrolet dealers, but we chose Mazda and got some very interesting information with the constant being the same franchise. So very interesting. And then we've got a great mystery shopper,

Nancy was responsible for us moving to a full-time female mystery shopper and that has been a stroker genius because not only is she able to see life of the retail car world differently from the female perspective but she's also treated differently and she's less likely to be suspected as a mystery shopper and on top of that she's just a brilliant fast on your feet is the word I think fast shopper so I'm going to turn it over to Stu Stewart, my son. He's also the general manager of our Toyota dealership, which has been around since 1975.

I'm doing that not out of advertisement, but out of total transparency. Yes, we have a car dealership. No, we're not trying to sell you Toyotas or any kind of a car. This is truly a consumer advocacy show. And it's good that we have a Toyota dealership because Nancy and Stu and Rick and I, you know, we're in the trenches. We, you know, we see what's going on today, yesterday,

going all the way back to 1975. And so it gives us a perspective on what we're talking about. It's not like we're an outsider coming in and criticizing a retail industry. And if you listen to the show and your regular listener, you will realize that we do not, do not, you know, try to put a spend on anything. If anything, we encourage you to buy other cars because a lot of cars out there on the road, models that are better than other models of Toyota. Toyota builds a good car, but Hoppa bill's a good car, Nissan bills a car, Hyundai Bill is a good car, General Motors bill is a good car. I mean, today, quality is not a problem. So we're doing our best to be impartial.

And Stu, the mic is all yours. What's going on with text and all that kind of stuff? Well, we do try to shop every kind of, Mr. Chef, every kind of car dealership. When you said that about just targeting the bad guys, Sometimes that's fun, but honestly for me, and maybe it's more fun for the listeners. For me, it gets boring. You'll hear a little passive aggressive comments in the report, like, once again, the usual spiel, because it's the same thing over and over again. Whenever we go to a good dealership, that's when things get interesting.

That's when it's not typical, and every sentence I read from Agent Lightning's report is a little surprise. I can't believe that that's actually happening. So I've got to be really honest with that. their listeners. This week, I just left it to Agent Lightning. She said she was going to be up in that area in the Pittsburgh area. And she said, what dealership I said, I'm going to let you pick it because you picked the best ones. And so she chose the Mazda dealership, which is perfect, because that kind of fit into the theme that we had just going for almost two months now.

So it's really interesting. So now we've got a snapshot of what it's like to buy a Mazda at a new Mazda dealership in South Florida, in the Nashville area. And now, in the Pittsburgh area. So we're getting a pretty broad geographical sampling of the experience. And I'm not going to give anything away, but just giving the track record of the Masta dealerships, I was expecting, I was expecting to see a bad shop, and we might. I'm not going to give it away, but that's what we're expecting. You know, if I were affiliated with Mazda of America, or Mazda, Japan, for that matter, I'd be interested in reading this. Maybe we should, after this shopping report is over

is packaged the four monster shopping reports and send it to the headquarters somewhere at the Mazda Owners of America or even all the way back to Japan. And then we wait. And then see what happens. For the rest of our lives. Right. The rest of our lives, exactly.

Stu, I have a question for you. You know, when you speak, everyone's listening. Kind of like back in the day, who was it, Jay Hutton? E.F. Hutton, yeah. he's talking anyway they listen to you week in week out

we do a mystery shopping report what kind of an impact does it have on you in the good the bad and the ugly and the second part of the question is how do you feel about the radio show and where we are

going on this journey and how we affect the consumer my first reaction to that is like I said I'm going to be complete on it completely honest, I look at it from a professional standpoint, and it gives me great, great comfort to know that most dealerships still haven't gotten it. And from as a businessman and as a competitor, I like that because I see that they're light year. And that does not, that's not a commercial for us, but I'm going to say it, there are light years behind us. And so I always worry

about people catching up and doing it the modern way. It's so rare. So I feel good about that. On the radio show, this is one of the things. that I do in my life, and I bet you you all feel the same way. We all do a lot of things in our lives. We do professional business things. We work. We have families, and then we get involved in the community, and this is how I feel that I'm involved in the community. I don't go to civic meetings and rotary clubs and all that, but I do feel a connection to South Florida. I grew up here, and the fact that we're putting out good information, honest information that's helping people. Yeah. That makes me feel good all the time. So that's the long answer to you.

simple and excellent question. No, it was a good answer. And you covered everything, dotted the eyes across the ease. But my point here with Stu, Rick, Earl, myself, Jonathan, every week, weekend and week out, we are changing the climate in the auto industry. We do it. Again, I'm going to emphasize weekend and week out. And things are changing. And please don't assume that we're sitting here just looking to bash every single dealership and to build ourselves up. That is in our goal. Our goal is the consumer

and making life just a little bit easier and guiding you and leading you in the right direction. Well said. 877-960-9960. And you can text us at 772-4976530. Don't forget, your anonymous feedback.com. I would love to hear from someone about what we just covered. Your Anonymous Feedback.com.

Now back to the recovering car dealer. And back to Stu. Okay, we'll kick off our text this morning with the inaugural Ann Marie text. She sent me a link to a story. It says, good morning. Here's the story of a guy who stole a used car from a Lake City, Florida dealer, and then try to trade it in on a new car at the same dealership a few days later. I think everybody read about that.

obviously the deal didn't go through. Has anything like that happened to you or any other dealers that you know? That's from Anne-Marie. No. I mean, we've had cars stolen. We've had cars. There's all sorts of little scams. People take test drives.

They take a copy of the keys. They come back later. In my memory, and I'm not going to have to refer to Earl to go farther back in time, but in my 25 years, that's never happened to me. Yeah, that's a little crazy. A thief's like that that you don't worry about because they're going to get caught pretty fast. I mean, I saw that article, I posted on Facebook, and one of the funniest comments that came back was he hadn't heard about VIN numbers. And so that was new to him.

So, you know, thieves like that, fortunately, they don't last long. The ones who worry to us in our business are the professionals. and boy, they're good. They come in and they hit you and you never see them again and the next day or two the car's on a boat headed to Panama or Nigeria

and I'm serious. That's the way the professionals do it but the amateurs are annoying fortunately we're not having a problem knock on the wood so far in a couple of years I think for since we've had an incident.

I think one of... Yeah, it's rare. I think one of my famous memories is of me driving a Mazda and being pulled over in the famous North Palm Beach and being accused of stealing the car. And at that point, I was surrounded by probably four or five police cars. And unfortunately, I didn't have the proper identification in my Mazda at that time, changing cars.

It wasn't out of the ordinary. And I had to call Earl. and he made a joke out of it, and he told the police, this was on more than one occasion. He's made this statement. He didn't know me. I thought. He thought that was funny. The police didn't think it was very funny.

Don't ever try to joke when your wife was under arrest. So I thought that was being funny, and the police would ask me if I knew her, and I said I never heard of her. I'm sorry for putting your mouth to stolen. That's my fault. The funnier part about that is the fact that... Even Rick can't believe that. Oh, stick around, Rick. I got some more stories for you. Incidentally, I've got a book coming up.

I'll have to leave town, though. Anyway, the fact that they would accuse me of stealing a vehicle, and I was in North Palm Beach. You know how close I was to the dealership. So, ha, ha, ha, kumbaya. didn't like me. Earl had a reputation. I almost ended up in a who's go. Back to Stu.

Okay, let's jump over. We have a text here. It's from Sandy, and it's a question for Rick. Okay. He says, I have a 21 Sienna Hybrid van with 7,500 miles I love. I've had three situations at acceleration from a dead stop. When stepping on the pedal, there was a two to second a two-second delay, two-to-three-second delay, like in the old days, with the carburetor

acceleration pump that would go bad and not shoot an extra fuel to the carburetor to move quickly from a stop. It scared me on two occasions when I needed the power to catch up to traffic out of a driveway. Now I'm careful about pulling out from a stop. Any ideas what's causing this? Engine is never running when this has happened. Battery power only. Otherwise, it has a lot of power at all speeds with no hesitation at all.

Like I said, it's from Sandy. Okay, so that's a high. hybrid, I'm guessing. Yes. 2021 hybrid C.R. Now that is odd because unlike dual carburetor cars, this is a total different system. Now, when we first went to what we call drive-by wire, which means there's no more cables connected to the engine from the accelerator pedal, it's all electronic.

Those systems had a small lag of about a half a second to almost a second when you stepped on the gas pedal before the engine would catch in and there would go. but with hybrids however it's almost instantaneous that lag time dropped way down I would get into a dealership and have them put a scan tool on it and see if there's something going on and ask them to take that for a drive

because there should be almost no lag time between putting the pedal down and having that car go especially on a hybrid do you have any linkage of any kind could it be a mechanical issue with linkage that doesn't make sense though No, because there is no linkage anymore. The gas pedal has an electric sensor on it, and the wires go to the computer.

The computer tells the actual electric motors to get moving. Because the gas engine now is just a tag-along. It's the electric motors to drive the car. Yeah, Sandy, it scares me now that Rick doesn't know what it is, because he knows, especially on a late model Toyota. He knows to hook it to the computer. He knows to hook it to the computer. I talk to the computer and I say, hey, what's going on with you?

Why aren't you doing what you're supposed to do? What I was trying to say was that it scares me for you because you should bring it in right away because if it can do that and we have no idea why it might do something else that we'd have no idea why that it could be worse. So we might even want to tow it in for you or the dealer nearest you. tow it in and have somebody put it on the diagnostic machine. You want to get that fixed because that's, I haven't heard the Rick stumped on a late model Toyota in a long time.

And a two-second or three-second hesitation when you depress the accelerator, that's very, very weird, and we need to look at it ASAP. Yeah, that's an eternity of time. Yeah. Okay, let's move on. All right, let's jump over to anonymous feedback. I know we have a few here that came in. Good, there's no name on this one.

It's anonymous. Oh, good. I had a bad experience at Nelson Mazda. Okay, this is who we show. Wow. And this is the good ones from up in Nashville. Oh, man. Okay, I've had a bad experience at Nelson Mazda.

And then just for our listeners, last week, our mystery shopping report described a near perfect experience. It was really good. So I was buying a new 2018 Mazda CX-9, and after looking at the only blue one and haggling over the price, there at one price. Someone saw hail damage on the roof. The dealer wanted to fix it, and I asked if some money could be taken off the price. They said no. So I walked out and took the paperwork to a different dealer, and they matched the price and gave me a perfect blue Mazda CX-9. So always check it out before buying a new or used car. Well, that's great. It's a great comment. And it goes back to what we see so often. We will get a really bad shopping report

at a dealership and we'll go back six months or maybe even two or three years later and we get a really good shopping report or vice versa and our car dealerships are made up with human beings human beings are all different salespeople are all different virtually everybody in the car dealership is paid on commission so you could go into a car dealership with a honest owner honest management and you get a rotten apple on the sales floor a salesperson that you shouldn't be there. We've had them and we'll have them again. We might even have one or two now, right, Stu? We don't know. We got 30 salespeople and how am I to say that there's not one of them that has got a problem with transparency. So thanks very much. Even Nelson

Mazda is not perfect and I'd like to say we're going to go back soon but we can't only if Agent Lightning happens to be back in Tennessee. But thanks so much, great feedback. Right. We actually have another anonymous feedback on Nelson Mazda. I guess we struck a nerve. Different reasons. So the last one complained because Nelson Mazda wouldn't take anything off the price after repairing the hail damage. This one says, has an issue with the dealer fee because they did have a little dealer fee. This commenter says, I disagree with your grade on the mystery shop of Nelson Mazda. The fact this dealer has a fake dock fee should reduce the grade to a B plus at best. A $400 fake fee is not small.

And, you know, my comment is for the whole, the rest of the country, it's in South Florida, we're seeing dealer fees of $3,000. So when we say small, we're speaking, this is relative to what we're accustomed to. So certainly in Nashville or in the suburbs of Nashville, $400 is a different, has a different value than it does in Miami. So I agree with you. And we grade on the curve and we cut them some slack. I refer to a customer yesterday, a customer reader of my newspaper column in the hometown news call me

because he wants to do some business regarding Lexus, and he has a Lexus lease. I refer to them to JM Lexus in Coconut Creek, Florida, because they have, they advertise no dealer fee, but they really have. Do you remember what it is, too, is it $99 or $199? very small dealer fee. In fact, I called the... What dealer was that? J.M. Lexus. Oh, yeah, yeah. It was very small. It was $199.

So I called the general manager there, and I said, you know, you got a great dealership. I refer all my friends who want to buy Lexus, and on the radio I refer people to J.M. Lexus at Coconut Creek. And you do everything, squeaky, clean, transparent. Why do you have the dealer fee? And I says, it's very small. It's almost inconsequential, especially when you're buying a Lexus. And he says, I know you're right.

We're going to look at it. I don't know if they looked at it. We need to go back and double check. But, yeah, the same thing with Nelson Mazda, small dealer fee compared to certainly a lot of stuff in South Florida. But why have it at all? Take the deal. If you've got to have that profit, and that's the reason it's there, put it in the price for the car that you advertise. And let the customer see it up front.

And that's the only reason we criticize you is because you don't put it up front so the customer can see it. That's right. All right. Next, anonymous feedback. And this is, I think, somebody, last week we had somebody criticizing us for a video we had on our YouTube channel that was criticizing attacking the four-square selling system. And the commenter came back, said, to clarify, we reacted to the comments who was defending the four-square selling system. We just said, hey, listen, we're just not that familiar with these nefarious and evil techniques. So we don't know. Then he says to clarify, he says the four square selling system includes trade in on the sheet, which is not part of that. And I'm just going to, I'm saying, you're wrong. It does include the trade.

I'm a thousand percent sure about that. And I'm not going to dwell on it too long, but I would refer anybody who has a Consumer Reports account to go on the Consumer Reports. Or just Google, 4Square Sailing System. You'll find the Consumer Reports article as a detailed article to explain how dealerships screw you with the Foursquare. square and includes trade is one of them. It has trade, down payment, monthly payment, purchase price. That's the four square system. Yeah, these are the hot buttons.

The reason this selling system, this devious consumer unfriendly, system was developed, is to identify the hot buttons of people that buy cars. Now, Nancy, when she's buying a car, if she weren't educated consumer and part of the show, if she was just on the street buying a car, maybe she was hung up on the value of her trade. Maybe if she's trading her famous Barracuda. She'd want a lot of money for that car, and you would really impress her by giving her more money than any other dealer. Whereas Stu, when he goes in, he might be thinking terms of payments.

He said, you know, I got a payment now, $199 a month, I've got to keep it at $1.99 a month, and you're hung up on payments. And Rick, you could be hung up on price. I want to get a big discount. If you give me a big fat discount, then... all by the car. So we all have our hotter hot buttons and that way when you're working the system you identify the person's hot button. Is it the discount? Okay, let's we can we could give you a huge discount Rick but and they're not

going to tell you this by doing under-allowing on your trade-up. We won't give you very much your trade-in but we'll turn it around and make it look like a big discount. So we'll maybe tell you, maybe we'll give you a thousand dollars less when your trade-in is worth but we'll give you a $500 more discount, we're still $500 ahead of the game. So you see what the purpose is to trick the buyer and find out your hot button. The name of the game is, don't have one hot button, anything. Your trade and allowance, the price of the car, the discount, all these things are important.

Bottom line price eliminates all the tricks. If you get a bottom line price, they can't trick you. And as a matter of fact, that's what Consumer Report says. It says ignore everything else's focus on your other. Ladies and gentlemen, what's your hot button? Have you changed your mindset? Are you able to go and purchase lease with a clear mind? Give us a call at 877-9-60-990-60.

Ladies, $50 for the first two new lady callers. And I remind you, ladies, whatever you have to discuss with us, do you want to call and say hello? Perfect. If you would like to discuss maintaining your... your vehicle or what you're doing in this microchip shortage

and whether you can wait for a car, we'd love to talk to you. And you win yourself $50 for the first two new lady callers 877-960 or you can text us for everyone else at

772-497-6530. Now back to Stu. Excuse me, we're going to go to the telephones and We're going to talk to Marty. Marty's a regular caller from West Palm Beach. Good morning, Marty. Hi, how are you today?

You out there, Marty? What I wanted to tell you is, yes, two days ago I went. I brought my wife's CRV in for its first service at Moore's Honda. And while I was waiting for the car to be done, I looked out in the lot. They don't have one CRV in the lot. The lot is almost totally empty. And the concierge salesman there said he doesn't think things may even get back to normal until March or April of 22.

So I said, are you taking orders on cars? They used to take orders. And he said, now when a truck comes in, they call some people that wanted a certain car. if they show up and buy it right away. And they fight to the death over it? Yes, yes. It's it. And also I wanted to tell you,

the guy, like I told you, I think a couple weeks ago, the finance guy gave me a good price on their maintenance, 93 cents a month. And the charge on the maintenance is for an oil change, and the tire rotation was over $64, which I didn't have to pay. So all I can say is Toyota's two-year free

thing is actually a very good deal. We don't have to pay for it. Yeah, and other dealers besides manufacturers, besides Toyota do there. There are quite a few. I'm going to say... BMW does, I think. I think about half the manufacturers out there have some free service. And of course

today, the cost of maintenance is very, very small. So, yeah. We have maintenance contracts, studying hard when they try to sell you one in the finance department, see exactly what's covered, and then look at what the owner's manual recommend you do, and find out from the dealer, what do you charge for this, this, and this. This way you compare what you would pay for it versus the fact that you can buy the maintenance contract, and if you get a better deal on buying the maintenance contract, buy it. What the dealers generally find when they sell you a maintenance contract is, most of the

people don't bring it back for maintenance. So everything they sell it to you for, they give for profit. But you should not do that. You should go by the recommended owner's menu. Hey, Marty, I think that Honda might be the only one who doesn't. So it's a, give me a second. Alpha Romeo, BMW, Mini, Cadillax, Chevy, Buick, GMC, Ford, Lincoln, Hyundai, Genesis, Jaguar Jeep, Kia, Lexus, Porsche, Ram, Subaru, Toyota, Volkswagen, Volvo. They all offer free maintenance programs. Yeah, so Honda's unusual if they don't offer free maintenance. Yeah, and Honda, there's people that love Honda, and they just, you know, I've tried

to steer a few people off of a Honda, except for my wife, and, you know, people just like Honda, and they say, hey, I'm going to stick to that manufacturer. It's a great car. It's good to love Hondas because they build one of the best cars in the world. Yeah, Toyota only offered the free maintenance. That was after the big recall crisis where Toyota was facing the existential crisis, and people were like, well, it was a huge crisis, but they offered that to restore faith in the brand.

That was 10 years ago. We got the CRV in April, and they had, you know, CRVs for some reason. April, I guess, wasn't a bad month. And, you know, we didn't have any problem, and they took back. the Camry that we had seven months early. So, you know, it worked out good for us. But now you've got to wait. Yeah, I think you're smart to wait,

and I think this is the condo salesperson. He may have believed this, or may not have, but I think the shortage will be over well before March or April 2022. But by telling the prospective customer that is going to be a long, long time, they're less likely to wait. I personally think that we will see a reversal within the next 30 days continuing on through December.

And I think that any time the last quarter of this year, toward the end of the year, you're better off and can make a good purchase then. Okay. All right. We'll have a good day. Have the rest of good weekend. Thanks, Marty. You're a great caller. We really appreciate your call.

Yeah, we love hearing from you, Marty. You know, I'm surprised that we haven't seen auctions happening in cars. showrooms. I remember back when the Cyan brand was really hot and they had these special edition cars and you couldn't get them and people are traveling from all over the country to get these cars and they started auctioning them off in showrooms

and the Prius also. Yeah, and the Prius so I'm like when he told me what Ed Morris Honda was doing, I'm surprised they didn't say hey this one got a truckload and we're going to have an auctioneer out there and they're going to run up the price and make all the money. Ladies and gentlemen, 877-960 9960, or you can text us at 772-497-6530. How has the shortage affected you?

Has it? This is not funny, but I talked to someone yesterday, and they owned a dry cleaning facility, and there's a shortage on hangers. I can't get any hangers. Not funny, but yes, Rick. I was just going to say, I do have a couple of YouTube comments on this very same subject, too.

It's a very big thing going right now. Yeah, let's go to Rick. Negan 1 says, I want to ask Earl, he said after Christmas, auto inventories would be back. I'm thinking not my local dealerships. GM and Ford are fairly empty. I see an issue with manufacturing and not getting parts to the assembly lines going. I work for one of the largest snack food companies and PLC controls and variable speed drives are getting four-month lead times. This is all manufacturers of all components.

I think we're going to be in trouble soon because factories can't make the products because parts are not available to keep the lines going. It goes on to say, is Earl's prediction for inventory still accurate? And I also had Big Hamza 22 come in to ask, when can we expect dealerships to get inventory back to pre-pandemic levels? Well, Megan, it's a good observation, and maybe I am wrong. I've been wrong before. First of all, the shortage is mainly in one thing. It's a pretty broad thing. It's microchips. And I promise you that the microchip manufacturers of the world, in fact, we buy money. most of our microchips overseas now, but the microchip manufacturers of the world are pouring it on.

And in my long, over half a century experience, when a shortage exists, the money, the monetary incentive to catch up and build something that you can sell immediately is just too huge to resist. So the microchip manufacturers of the world are going to be pouring more microchips out than they ever had before. because they want to make the money and sell the microchips. They'll probably raise the price of the microchips, too, if they haven't

already. And that's why shortages always are resolved, in my experience, sooner than we think. And I know from talking to Toyota that we are going to see a better availability of cars this coming month than we

did this month, and then we'll see even better at the following month. And the shortage will vary from car to car. I mean, Honda will have one situation, Chevrolet will have another. But I would, you're going to get taken advantage of price-wise so badly today, even if you had to wait four months instead of two months, I think it would be well worth your while. If you have to have a car, then we've talked about that on the show. We'll give you some advice on how to buy it the very lowest price

today, but that very low price today is going to be thousands of dollars higher than the lowest price two, three months from now. You know, to your comment about the microchip shortage and the hike in price, we watched the show, we watched 60 minutes, I think it was a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. And one of the largest microchip companies has raised their prices. Yeah. And it is unbelievable how much they have raised their prices.

Everybody, we raised our prices at our Toyota dealership. Everybody's called supply and demand. And how high you raise your prices depends on your conscience and your ethics and your moral code because there's no law saying that a car dealer cannot sell a car for thousands of dollars over sticker price. In fact, the Mazda dealers that we gave the bad grades to, they were literally selling their Mazas. If you didn't like it, too bad, buy the Mazda somewhere else. They were charging thousands of dollars over sticker price. In our dealership, we draw the line at MSRP, and we're selling most of our cars actually below MSRP,

but there's no hidden fees and there's no surprises. So it depends on you. Legally, when you buy a car today, the dealer can charge you. I'm going to exaggerate to make my point, a million dollars over a sticker. And if you're crazy enough to want to buy a car way, way over a sticker, buy the car today, but I don't think you should. I think it's a mistake. Yeah, it's up to you.

you. We're going to get back to Rick in a minute, but we're going back to the end, Stu, but we're going to go to the phones and we're going to talk to Bill in West Palm Beach. Welcome back, Bill. Hi. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Good question. One is service department shop supply fees. Rip-off, hidden fee, take advantage of the customer fee. It's the service department version of the hidden dealer fee. Most all dealers charge it. In fact, most independent service departments charge it. And it varies.

Typically, it's a percentage of your total bill. It could be 5%, 10%. So you go in there and you get $200 worth of service. At the bottom of the invoice, your service invoice, it will be something. Sometimes they call it miscellaneous. Sometimes they call it hazardous waste disposal. They have as many names for the service hidden fee as they do the car buying hidden fee. And it's just to get money out of your pocket.

Hopefully you'll ignore it and don't have an innocuous kind of a description that sounds maybe legitimate. Suntry supplies. And Rick, we don't have one, so he probably, I was going to say, what other names can you think of? But we don't charge the fee, so you've never seen it. Shop supplies. Shop supplies. Shop supplies. There's just waste disposal fees.

There's all kinds of them. The only one that I know of that I know is a legitimate disposal fee is $1 each for tires. That's a threat. For tires. That is a legitimate, I believe it's state mandated, but don't quote me on that. But there is a $1 per tire disposal fee on tires. But that's it. And batteries, too.

Batteries, actually, I think that's supposed to be in the price of the battery. That's when you purchase a new vehicle, so there's a battery disposal fee when you have a new vehicle purchased, $1.50 a. You're right, but that's only on new cars when you're buying the new car. Not when you're buying a battery through a shop. They shouldn't be charging any additional for that. And those fees shouldn't be taxable. So just like the dealer fee, if you have a tax on something like a battery, it is not taxable by the state. So that's one way to find out about it.

But yeah, good question. We talk too much about hidden dealer fees, but instead of the hidden service fees, actually it's a lower number, but you get your car service far more often than you buy a car. So if you look at the big picture, you're getting ripped off probably more on hidden miscellaneous fees and service departments than you are hidden car fees

when you buy the car. My other question is, when they say high mileage oil if you change your oil at a regular interval whether it's 3,000 or 5,000 miles

does that matter if you use the high mileage oil? Gimmick my opinion I would stick if your car calls for standard oil dinosaur fossil oil use that use a quality brand name

if it calls for synthetic use synthetic but use a quality brand name and make sure that the recommended weight of the oil so if it's 5W20 or 5W30 or 10W30 0 W20 or like the

newer cars 0 W16 as long as you've met those standards and you have a good quality oil follow the factory recommended maintenance plan for how often you should change that oil and you should have no problems. If your engine has started to wear out to the point that it's burning a lot of oil,

that needs to be addressed as an engine repair, not as changing to a different type of oil that's going to magically fix your engine, because it's not. An engine that has got worn components and is burning oil is because there's a problem with the engine. It's not a problem with the oil. It's a problem with the engine. And you're not going to fix it by trying to use some magic,

brand of oil that, oh, it's high mileage oil. That's just advertising, Bill. It's puffery, and all oil is intended to be high mileage, and it's probably all the same mileage. It's depending on the, if you're using the proper oil. It's like aspirin. You know, Bayer is not better aspirin than, you know, CDS. Public brand, wateries, yeah. So, so oil is oil, it comes out of the ground, even the synthetic oil comes out of the ground and

it's oil. And if you buy the right oil for your car it's high mileage or low mileage however you want to look at it. Yep. That's what I thought. But anyhow, you guys keep up to great work.

Thank you. And if I get time, I'll speak to you next week. I hope you do, Bill. We love your calls. Thank you. Bye-bye. Yeah, it was great hearing from you, Bill. Again, ladies, $50 for the first two new lady callers, give us a call, share your story, or just call to say hello, 877-960-99-60. And out of the control room, I got a text message, and I'd like to share it with everyone who's

listening to the show and who may be calling in. And it reads the studio phone, since it's a rolling line, we'll give a busy signal. If the phones are full, it just rings. I've been testing it with the owner, Vic. This week, we are going to either up it five lines or try to figure it out. Anyway, if you get a busy signal, just keep on calling. And that way, the callers, we don't want you to think that we're not answering the phone. Well, that should be fixed.

Thank you very much, Control Room, and thank you very much. Yeah, thanks, Mike. I will call the owner myself because that is a very, very bad thing for people who think we don't want to answer the phone. At the beginning of the show, we say we prioritize phone calls, and if it rings and rings, then it sounds like we're not being honest with you. So that bothers me a lot. Thank you. And thanks, Mike, for allowing me to, you know, share it with all of our listeners. Speaking of the phones, we're going to go to Sharon, and she's calling us from Jupiter.

Good morning, Sharon. Welcome. Good morning. How many, have you called before? I have. Oh, welcome back. Thank you. I just have a quick question.

I've got something that, on my rims, someone told me it's called break dust, and I'm wondering what causes it. I've had my brakes checked several times. Yep. This is, it's totally normal. when you're stepping on the brakes what's happening is there's a big metal disc in there called a rotor it's a steel rotor and the pads actually have a friction material adhered onto steel backing plates and the brakes will squeeze those pads down against that rotor to slow it down so that's what slows your car when you're stepping on the brakes those pads that friction material will slowly start to wear away little bits at a time and that's that brake dust that comes out and it shows up on the rims very easily. If you keep the car washed often enough and keep the rims nice and clean, you can actually walk out there with just a simple rag and wipe that dust right off.

But it's always a good idea to keep your wheels as clean as possible because eventually that dust is going to hold all sorts of dirt and other chemicals and it'll start to corrode in and make the rims not look good. Okay. Okay, so I'm not missing anything by, I was concerned that there was something going on that I should be addressing. No, no, it's completely normal. That's exactly how they work. Well, thank you, guys.

I appreciate your help. Thank you, Sharon. Thanks for joining us this Saturday morning. We love hearing from the ladies. Give us a call again. And tell your friends, $50 for the first two, new. lady callers. 877-960, or you can text us at 772-497-6-5-30. Where are we going, guys? Well, I've got one last one here from Donovan.

Okay. Hi, Donovan. It's our buddy Donovan. He says, dealers are never going to go to pre-pandemic inventory levels. It will not happen. Auto companies are enjoying the extra profit way too much. The auto manufacturers brought a lot of this on themselves. There's a great article in fortune that explains this in more detail on the chips they use. But basically, the auto industry is way behind. They use fabs from several generations ago. 90 nanometer chips are still common in cars, and that was cutting-edge technology in 2004. The chip fabricators do not want to turn those old lines back on.

They want to be making current generation chips, so they will raise the price on the auto industry. TSM is the largest chip manufacturer in the world, and they would rather be making the latest and greatest for Apple, not something for 15 years ago for a car they don't care about. The main semiconductor in a current iPhone is 5 nanometers for perspective. Because I do recognize the term. The nanometer, I guess he's talking about the thickness of the microchip.

And 90 nanometers versus 5 nanometers, it'd be kind of like just put in comparison is, do you want to have a part that is 5 inches tall or a part that is 90 inches tall installed on your car? I happen to be an expert on microchips when I start in the business. But here's where you're wrong, Donovan. They will not limit production, even if the prices go up, production will always meet demand. And the thing, your savior is a consumer, buying a car, is the very same thing that is your demise.

Intense competition by retail car dealers. The manufacturers have what we say as dealers over-dealer. There are too many car dealers out there. There's too many Chevrolet dealers, too many Toyota dealers. There are, as we say at our dealer meetings, there's a car dealership on every block like every gas. station, and used to be bank. Like Walgreens and CVS, I see

your point, yep. Competition will keep the price down, and that is why the manufacturers will also not limit manufacturing, because when the dealer says, I need a thousand cars, they're going to sell you a thousand cars. They might raise the price,

but they will sell you a thousand cars. The microchip will feed the dealer. The dealer will, I mean, the manufacturer will feed the manufacturer, the manufacturer will the dealer and you're the consumer, you're going to have all the cars you want in a few months in my estimation. And certainly, you know, I believe Donovan, they will never go back.

I promise you, Donovan, the volume will go back. And, in fact, it will go way up because there'll be more consumers buying cars than ever before. So, yeah, it is not, there is no conspiracy between the, with the dealers and the, and the manufacturers to increase car prices, is an adversary relationship that you don't see between the manufacturer and the dealer. As we dealers feel, our problem is the manufacturer sending us two damn many cars, and they put the pressure on you. When they wholesale a car to us, like you've said since I started, every single car they

wholesale to us, that's a full sticker to us. So when they sell the cars to the dealers, they're making all, they're not making, the manufacturers aren't making more money because dealers are charging over, charge. for the cars now. They made their money when they wholesaled the car. And it's the dealers that would like to hold on to these profits, but the second availability is there, they're going to meet demand, and they're going to drive the prices down. The educated consumer, listening to this show, you've got more power on prices that you pay for a car than the dealer does. The dealer can't negotiate. We have a toilet

dealership. We can't negotiate with Toyota. I don't care if we buy a million cars a month or 100 cars a month from Toyota the price is the price is the price and every dealer pays the same thing and we can't say hey no one's buying this model sell it to us for less and we actually lose money selling cars because of the incentivizing

systems that a lot of the manufacturers including Toyota users and we look at selling new cars during times of high demand and when the prices are not artificially high like they are now we actually say okay

this is going to be a slow month for us. Our forecast is we're going to lose money in the new car department. And then we do it because if we don't, if we don't sell the cars fast, then Toyota won't send us enough cars.

It's called turn and earn. We have to sell cars to earn cars. We don't get the trade in cars that we need to get to power use car inventory. And we don't have cars for service. Right. So that's, we got to keep, nothing happens until a car gets sold. Yeah. And from Donovan here, you think car dealers are going to go back to the days of having a thousand cars on the lot?

Of course. Yeah. It's supply and demand. I mean, we don't. We'll have a thousand. We won't. We don't. We'd have a thousand horse and buggies on the lot if that's what people wanted.

I mean, it's supply and demand. It's the free enterprise system. So, yes, it's going to be crazy, crazy, crazy, until the system changes, and it'll be a long time coming before the retail automobile. We're trying to change it, folks. Earl store on cars is our way of changing the way that the cars are retail and it won't happen in my lifetime maybe in yours and ladies and gentlemen the proof is right here every Saturday morning how we're changing everything that has anything to do with purchasing a vehicle servicing a vehicle anything at all

we're helping right here but we need your help and by joining Earl's Vigilantes You can help all of us And all the people in your community And you can also win yourself a free hat So go to Earl's Vigilantes and sign up And it's a good thing Earl, your hat

Your famous hat There you go Isn't that cute? You caught me that? That's a good looking hat too By the way. Stoo designed that logo It's a vigilante logo That's my brother's dog holding the red phone. And the sound effects?

Garnie. Listen, it's a hat. There's a dog with a cowboy hat talking on the phone. You can't find that anywhere. And I will stake my reputation on there. Are you working on that? Oh, it's right there on the hat. He copyrighted it.

Oh, I didn't copy. Oh, yes, I did. Thank you, Rick. It's a dog wearing a hat talking on the phone. Come on. Let me take a look at that. Everybody should want that hat. My age speaks for herself.

We are going to go to John in Palm City, and, well, John is definitely a regular caller. Good morning, John. Good morning to everyone. Back in the news again is Takata Airbags. This week, the NHTSA made an announcement that they're going to go after 200 models from 20 automakers, from 2011 to 2019. for some reason these are cars that they overlooked in May 2020

I don't know why it got overlooked but they're going on it and they say the probe is going to go on very heavy because we all know what's going on with these airbags you know pneumonia nitrate that's in it especially here in Florida

with the high temperature and humidity they get set off and especially in cars like three to five years old and these are models 2011 to 2019 Remember so far, in the United States, 19 people have been killed just from that explosion without having an accident. 28 worldwide, 400 have been injured. We're talking about a lot of vehicles, and they're going after 200 models of these 20 automakers.

So it's a very serious problem, and they also go in after ones that have been replaced. And they say some of the replaced ones are more dangerous than the original ones. that was recalled. So we have a major problem. I'm glad it's back in the news again because people have to be aware and do their homework. Earl will give you the number

that you can call with your serial number and find out if your car has been a current refall has been called and you have it. So you've got to get back on your horse and get that car taken care of

because we're talking about especially in South Florida a very, very serious problem and these could explode and it could kill people. 30 million more are being investigated. Thanks so much, John. Thank you.

Thank you, John. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Thanks for the call. You know, it's also sad that when we have one crisis, other crises, fade into oblivion, the Ticcada Airbag has become forgotten with the COVID crisis. And, of course, the number of deaths in COVID had been astronomical compared to. to the Takada airbag. I will say this. When we say 28 deaths worldwide with the

airbag, that's 28 deaths that we know about. What happens when you're in a bad accident, as you probably, it's not even worth, I hate to think about these things, but you get to a bad accident where the airbag goes off, people die for a lot of reasons. It's a terrible situation. And if you see a person that has been killed in a traffic accident, usually there's no autopsy. The only way you can find out if the Takada Airbag explode is to carefully examine and do an autopsy and see what was the cause of death. The Takata Airbag explodes, the inflator explodes actually, like a shrapnel and a hand grenade, and the shrapnel goes into your body.

But in a terrible accident, who's to say which injuries were caused by that? So I say 28 deaths worldwide is insane. I see there are a lot more than that, but on the side out of mind, we have the COVID on mine, and a lot of other tragedies that we make bigger press. The media is tired of the Takut Airbag, and they want to talk about other things. Anything that will draw watchers, listeners to the social media or the television or the newspaper, and you can sell advertising, that's what gets the publicity. Absolutely.

I'm going to give you an update. The update is from Mike in the conference. control studio. And, you know, I don't get a chance to talk about Mike very often. He's sort of behind the scenes. And I'll tell you what, he really does a fantastic job. Week in and week out, and without him, you wouldn't be listening to me right now. And we're going to share some information with you from Mike. And he's letting us know that everything is working fine. There's not an issue. I am just mentioning why sometimes

people say that nobody is answering. And when callers will text us and tell us that nobody's answering, you can understand where that leaves Mike. He's just scratching his head because it doesn't make them look very good.

But in fact, mentioning why sometimes people say that nobody is answering is because the phone lines are full. of callers as they are right now. So that is a plus, and I want to thank Mike for being here every single Saturday running this ship very smoothly. Now, ladies, $50 for the first two new lady callers, give us a call. Are you able to maintain your own tires, ladies? I dabble in that

subject a bit. I check the air pressure in my tires. It was difficult in the beginning, but now it's like you can do it with your eyes closed. So to speak. Anyway, ladies, a little encouragement. Give us a call. Anything at all. 877-9-60.

$9.60. And $50. It's a win-win situation. We're going to go to Mark in Palm Beach Gardens. Good morning, Mark. Good morning to everyone. there on the staff. I just have a couple of quick comments and then just one question.

I was trying to listen to the whole show that had kind of an emergency with my 97-year-old mother, so I wasn't able to hear everything that had been commented on. But one thing I just wanted to say when you were talking about shop supplies, tire disposal and all that. I know that on the body shop end of the business that when you get your invoice, you will see hazardous waste disposal and to show the customers know that when paint operations are done on a vehicle in a mixed paint, that paint has to be disposed of and it costs Earl and all the other dealers a lot of money to dispose of hazardous materials these days.

So that is a legit charge. I did want to mention one thing. I know Nancy just mentioned about the vigilante program. Usually when I call in, I'd like to, not that Nancy doesn't explain it, but being a vigilante myself since the beginning, I've been very happy to help. I've only had a couple of customers that have contacted me about service issues and needing help. But just to once again explain to the listeners that the vigilance.

program is designed to where if you have any questions about sales or lease or service questions or body shop questions you know the vigilantes are volunteers they don't get paid anything and we're more than happy to share our knowledge with you so don't hesitate to go on to the website and there's a list of my contact information in tech contact information of all the other vigilantes and please there is no simple or minor question any questions at all please feel free to use the program the program is there for you one other thing we talked about the cost of cars new and used I just want

I had nothing to do with the car industry but I was very surprised I like to cook and smoke spare ribs I went into public the other day And one rack of ribs, it used to be about $11. One rack of ribs, pork ribs, $28.50 for one rack of ribs. For one rack of ribs. Wow. One other thing, I love my Vigilante hat, but there was some talk about quite a while ago about T-shirts. Did anybody ever do anything more with a T-shirts for us?

There's a global T-shirt shortage. And, is you really? I don't know. It kind of got, we were so proud of the hats. We just, we didn't want to ruin that with the... We might even get your whole uniform,

Mark. We'll work on a jumpsuit. Give it, you a texture size, we'll get you a jumpsuit. A complete, yeah, I'll get your jumpsuit. Yeah, well, how about some vigilante boxers, you know, that's working. Hey, um, one

last, one last thing. the one thing that maybe it's just I don't listen well enough you know the chip shortage Earl what exactly is the reason for the chip shortage is it materials you know what is it

silver or you know a mineral shortage no it's volume but exactly you made that it's a chip itself in other words the microchips are used in virtually everything we buy today if you can buy it on Amazon

it's probably got a chip in it maybe not toilet paper but everything it used to be mechanical and now it's electronic has got chips and so a worldwide demand surged suddenly with a COVID crisis

and the chips just they ran out and so it's a shortage of being able to supply the chips fast enough so they just weren't able or aren't able to manufacture them fast enough is that it?

Yeah exactly yeah they're there for every chip they manufacture there's 10 people out there saying, I need one, and they can't build them fast enough. Wow, it just seems to me, from a layman's point of view, and, you know, some of the other public may share the same thing. It just seems like it's been going on for so long. Yeah. It's just like, wow, how much longer it's it going to be?

It was building up before the pandemic. So, like, I mean, the 5G cellular networks put a huge amount of pressure, and that was, everything was taken off prior to the pandemic, the new 5G,000. network. So that was taking a lot of the chips and then when then everything gets shut down, then they stop production and now it's trying to, you know, come back. And a microchip is a very complex thing to manufacture. As I said earlier in the show, I began the business of working in a microchip factories. I was working for Westiegel. And I saw how they were manufactured. I was an engineer and it's a very complex, very precise. The chips are built in clean run. are people that work inside.

It's not like making a can of tuna. You'll go into a microchip factory. You wear a clean suit. You're in a clean room. And it's very precise. You just can't turn up the volume and double your volume. You're talking about a lot of investment in extremely expensive machinery and extremely trained personnel to make a microchip.

It's real. It's basically a laboratory. Yeah. In hospital conditions. Exactly. Yeah. I won't take any more. time.

Thank you, Mark. Mark, before you go. All right, you guys, have a great weekend. And, Stu, your younger brother does a good job of filling in for you, but we still love to have you there at the helm. You guys have a great weekend. Mark, before you go, I want to thank you very much for being part of Viral's Vigilantes and the essence of your call earlier.

I know we talked a lot about, you know, the microchip and this, you know, a little. the pandemic. But what you're doing, what you're doing for us, what you're doing for the consumer and the people in every community that you're reaching, we want to thank you very much. Well, I just wish I had more consumers calling me because sitting at home 24-7 in a wheelchair, I got all sorts of time. So please give me a call. I'm here to help just like all the other vigilantes. So everyone, enjoy your weekend. Nice talking. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Mark.

Okay, now, Rick had a comment. I was just going to disagree on one point, he said, which is the disposal fee on paint and body shop. That should be in the cost of painting the car. Of course, yeah. Because we don't charge a disposal fee on oil when we do an oil change. That's in the price of the oil change. Same thing with changing cooling. There are a lot of legitimate costs, but there are a lot of legitimate costs, but they're cost.

And that's what business spend do. They pay their costs. They don't charge the customer for their cost. They include it in the price of the product they sell. So, yes, indirectly, the customer's charging. But when you add it after you quote the price, then that's called deception. And by the way, hazardous waste disposal sounds so good that Mark believes it, a lot of people believe it, during shortages, like we've had oil shortages, where we actually were paid for our waste oil. Companies would come by and pay us X dollars per gallon for the privilege of disposing of our waste oil.

And there are other materials, scrap, steel, and a lot of other things. People dispose of this, and they charge us a fee for the disposal, or sometimes they pay us. So, businessmen should pay their own costs, take all those costs, and put on the price of the product they're selling. That's like the essence of the show That's what we've been saying Anything that changes the price After the fact should just not happen That's wrong

You know this microchip shortage It's a little bit of a gray area here And the guys here probably Can add to this But Mark was asking You know exactly Where does this microchip shortage Come from

And with the pandemic with the microchip and its components and what it's made out of. If you think about the syringes that they are using to dispense the vaccination for this COVID-19, it is similar. The product and the components are, there are some that are similar to the microchip that's being built. I have to ask Earl to shed some light on this. Well, the syringes?

Have I left you speechless? Yes, I don't know. Okay, maybe I'll be a little more specific. The syringes that hold the vaccine when you were injected for a booster or there are similar components in that syringe, the silicone that makes that syringe that are in, the microchip. Okay. Yeah, so the microchips are made of silicon, which is sand. Sand and silicon. So there's a lot of sand and... Yeah, hence the shortage.

Okay, okay. 877-960-9960. What are your thoughts, ladies and gentlemen? Give us a call on the topic we just covered. 877-960-99-60, or you can text us 772. 497-6530. Now back to Stu. Okay, we have anonymous feedback here. Hey, don't log me out.

Hi, what is the advantage of having a dual store? In other words, two brands in one locations like Ford Lincoln or Buick GMC, instead of having a standalone store, for example, just Ford or just DMC. Thank you. Well, it's not actually an advantage unless you have a make car that doesn't sell very well And small dealers in rural areas, they might sell Buick's, but there's such a low population and potential customer base that they have to have on other franchise. So that might be Cadillac Buick or Cadillac, even Chevrolet Buick.

There are some dealerships in very small areas. There used to be one out west of Palm Beach County and Bell Glade that had all the GM franchises under one roof. So it's a matter of volume. manufacturers far prefer exclusive makes so and most dealers will not most manufacturers will not allow a dealer to add another make even if it's his own make they want you to specialize on one product I could be wrong about this too I think that certain things are paired up like generally if you see it a four dealership it's a well actually it never mind I am wrong I just thought about a Ford dealership that doesn't have I thought that was very common to see Ford and Lincoln side by side it used to be yeah yeah yeah yeah all right more anonymous feedback oh we got a phone call yes we do so we're going to go to john in west palm beach welcome to the show john oh hello welcome or not welcome good morning

good morning good morning we knew what you meant it's early if you got a good body shop painter and that he knows how much to order there shouldn't be much disposal of paint and if there is why don't they give it to the customer for touch-up, since it's already mixed, instead of throwing it away. And even if there's a court left, they can still keep it on the owner. They had their carcass to keep it on the shelf in case they ever have a dent or a ding or have to have something painted. They've got the paint already mixed and ready to go.

John, the Environmental Protection Agency won't allow you to do that. They want to account for all your paint. And technically, they want to see that the paint is either on a car, or disposed of in a safe manner, safe to the environment. So they don't want to come by and say, well, you bought 10,000 gallons of paint last year, and you sold 8,000 gallons. What happened to the other 2,000 gallons? They don't want you to say, well, I gave it to my customers or I have it stored somewhere.

They want an absolute accounting. Make sure you didn't port in the inter-custal. Exactly. So that is the reason that the Environmental Protection Agency has a lot of them. the rules that are very stringent on anything that can contaminate the environment. Okay? Yeah, they got us coming and going, don't they do? Yeah, they're tough.

You hit the nail on the head, John. And John, you're actually very correct. I know several painters, have known several, quite a few through the years. Those guys can I tell you almost to within a tablespoon how much paint they're going to need to do a car. They are incredibly accurate. But the owners of the body shops, they are still going to look to get that little extra profit because we're not talking about the actual thing of, oh, yeah, there's paint to be disposed of. We're talking about the idea of where are they going to get some extra profit.

Because it's not so much any leftover paint. It's the paint that comes out of the gun where they're cleaning it up afterwards. The chemicals that they use to clean it up, the stuff they used to clean up, like the, painting booth, you know, all that stuff's got to go somewhere. So I understand, yes, there is waste that has to be disposed of, but again, our point is that the cost of that is supposed to be in the cost of painting the car. It's not supposed to be added on at the end and say, oh yeah, you owe us another 40 or 50 bucks. Well, I, again, Rick, it's the insurance company, 99% of our business is insurance business. The insurance companies come out in

they make an estimate on the car and they say we're going to give you this much for paint and materials right so that's part of the estimate that's part of the cost and generally is the insurance company that pays it so there's no there's no incentive you know the insurance company wants to keep the cost down so if you use less paint and you have open paint cans or whatever the environmental protection agency wants to see that paint is disposed of in a safe manner so no one's passing along the cost except maybe the insurance company because they are the ones that are paying the bill and they don't like to pass long because they like to keep the cost down. Our problem is we'll say to the insurance company, you're not allowing us enough for paint materials

and then we argue on behalf of the customer. Yep. Okay. Hey, you had to mention the insurance company. Ladies and gentlemen, if you don't know it, this is information breaking news for everyone. Earl and I are ready for a straitjacket. We're dealing with the insurance companies in our home. We have a huge, we had a huge blood. Okay, on 877-960 or Texas 772-497-6530. Rick, I have a question from you from a texter that I received and she says flat tires happen all the time. And ideally in the perfect world, you, you change. all four tires but that can't happen all the time can be hugely expensive yep what is your thoughts my opinion is if you have a flat tire that cannot be repaired

and you have to replace it put that new tire to the back of the car if your other tires are relatively close in tread the matching tire on that axle you're totally safe to have one new tire with a slightly older tire however if you've got one tire that is like 4.30 seconds and you're putting a brand new tire with it, you might want to consider just getting a pair of tires at that point.

Great information. Always buy tires in two or four. Very good. Ladies and gentlemen, free information right here at Earl Stewart on cars. We're so happy you tuned in. Hey, did anybody take a look at the Wednesday, September 22nd

report on the tundra? Toyota Reveals Redesigned 22 Tundra pickup truck. How about you, Rick? Do you hear anything about it? I've looked into a little bit on it. It's going to be a turbo V6. And a hybrid.

And a hybrid. And it's supposed to be quite the beast. They're doing away with V8s. They're going to get some incredible fuel economy, well, reasonable fuel economy. So it is really not talking to the economy much on these. But the numbers they're talking for. pork and horsepower because the economy even on the hybrid is still like 17 miles

to a gallon yeah but you're talking a full-sized truck hello and you're also talking about some incredible amounts of torque coming out of that system love the torque right here ladies gentlemen you heard it we're going to go to point in beach we're going to talk to kathleen and uh i am so happy kathleen is a first time caller Hi, Kathy Welcome You just won yourself $50, Kathleen Well, thank you

Thank you Send me your contact information I'll get that checkout to you this afternoon Email me What can we do for you? Well, my daughter bought a 2015 Sion FRS In 2019

And she paid $12,500 for it from Mullinac, forward north, North Palm Beach. At that time, she had an independent mechanic go over the car. She found nothing wrong, but it seems like a great car, so she bought it. Well, early this week, so it's less than two years, the engine went bad. And we took it over to, the first mechanic said it's the valve. So we contacted, who was it, Palm Beach Toyota, since the cyan is a Toyota. the product. And

they also said that the engine needs to be replaced. This car is only six years old. You know? And so they want $8,000 to fix the engine. And she still owes $8,300

on the car. Oh, goodness. I know. And then we looked it up that there was a class action suit for the same issue, but it's only on the 2013 Cyanne FRS, and that the cars would just stop working or they'd catch fire. So my daughter's only 24 years old, and this is her fifth car that she's had trouble with

for six, seven years. So she doesn't, we don't know what to do. We should. Well, interesting. You got our attention. My only thought, Kathleen, is that my only thought is that I would ask who the mechanic was that carefully checked over your car, and I'm not pointing any fingers, but you did exactly the right thing. You should, before you buy a car from a dealer, a used car, you should take it

to an independent mechanic that is trustworthy and then has knowledge and have them check the car over. If the car was in good shape six years ago, and if it was driven and maintained according to the owner's manual it is very surprising that you would have an engine that would blow up so did anyone diagnose the they say that needs a new engine did they say why I think Rick could could probably come up with maybe what was the cause if he knew what caused the engine to be replaced well they did I at Columbia two mechanics checked it over on this week one add a AAA over on military in Lake Worth and then he said the same thing and then so he

recommend we talked to Palm Beach Toyota and their mechanics checked it over and there were five mechanics looking at this car I think because my daughter is so young and cute but there's a lot of reasons a lot of reasons engines need to be replaced so I think it was if you could get the specifics if they did any kind of a written estimate with specifics then maybe we could give you an intelligent comment. How many miles are on the car? 124,000.

Okay. When your daughter bought it, how many miles did she have on it then when she first got it? 78,000. Okay, so she's gone about 40,000 miles, so this, give or take. And how often did she do the oil changes on it? She's very diligent and taking care of everything on her car. car. She absolutely loves the car. So, I think

two months ago she had an oil change. Okay. My only concern is if the oil was changed regularly and the car is maintained, because the engine that's in that car is actually made by Subaru. And again,

Subaru, their engines, they did have a couple of issues with some with the valves, but it was actually a the valve springs. And that was taken care of. So once that problem was solved, that was it. The engines were just incredible.

They rarely, if ever, had problems on them. So if she's got documented proof of proper service has been done, I would try to find out just what's failing in the engine. And unfortunately, you know, sometimes things do break. You know, sometimes you do get a bad one, and the engine will fail at a younger age like that. 120,000 miles is pretty low for an engine to be going out like that, but sometimes it does happen. Have they looked into the idea of getting you possibly a used engine?

I don't know. We were just at Palm Beach Toyota yesterday, and what he said was it needs a short block. Okay, yep. The estimate and you know, other things along with that, the... Right, it gets

pretty expensive, but that's why the idea of maybe finding a what's called a used engine, but it's actually where we're reclaiming parts from cars, say a car got in a crash, and the engine's perfectly fine, is sitting in a salvage yard somewhere. These salvage yards,

they will sell these at a very reasonable price, quite often, often even with like a one-year warranty on it, that at least then you'd be able to get it for a much more reasonable price than $8,000 just in parts. Yeah. It may be a better way to look at. They wanted only, I think, $2,500 for the engine, but then it was more than $4,000 for the work. Right, because what they're doing is they want to sell you the short block. Why don't you do this?

And it's a huge amount of labor. Why don't you do this? Why don't you bring the car into my dealership and let us take a look at it? What is your name? I miss your name again. It's Kathy Green. That's okay. Kathy Green.

And we need your contact information anyway, right? So you send that to us. But bringing it in and if you'll call for Rick Kearney when you come in, so you want Rick to take a look at it. We'll take a look at it and I'll give you a verification of that diagnosis. And Kathleen, because we're running out of time, I just want to ask you one more question. Has anyone else given you a price on this debacle that's taking place with your vehicle? Have you taken it anywhere else besides Palm Beach, Toyota?

Well, the other one is a mechanic. I think it's affordable auto. It's a AAA mechanic, and they're unmilled. military south of Hypolexo. Great. And said the same thing. He said anywhere from 6 to 8,000. Yeah.

This situation really calls for knowledge, and knowledge is power. And I wish you an awful lot of luck, an awful lot of luck on this situation. It is a situation that nobody really wants to be in. So stay in touch with us. Send me your contact information. and please bring that sign on to the dealership and ask for Rick. Okay. Have a wonderful weekend.

You too. Thank you. Thank you, Kathleen. Okay. Boy, where's the time go? It's already time for the mystery shot report. Well, I think we've got some top solely 934, so. And Rick?

Can we fit in one more from Donovan? He says, this week, Rivian started production. Lucid will start production any week now. So, and these are electric car manufacturers. So in 2022, there will be at least two more direct-to-consumer auto sales makers. Riving is going to sell a lot of pickup trucks next year. How do the traditional auto dealers deal with losing possibly a few million sales over the next few years to the direct-to-consumer brands? Well, the volume that we're talking about with these additional manufacturers, even including

Tesla, by the way, builds more electric cars than all the other manufacturers combined. And even that amount is a drop in the bucket compared to the total demand for combustion engine cars. So the dealers of the world have got a lot to worry about in 10 or 20 years, but nothing to worry about in the next five or six years, though. and they're all trying to get into the business too and this is the reason we're seeing a major shake-up of the entire industry and I predicted before on the show

we will be losing some major manufacturers the big guys like Volkswagen and Toyota will survive and some some won't maybe General Motors maybe Ford it's become a whole new ballgame but we're looking at 10 years or 20 years in the future electric cars, as exciting as they are, as fun as they are to drive, Nancy and I are driving

a Tesla, as you know, they're great cars, but they're not going to be a lot of them on the highway for a while. Okay. We got any more text over this, too? No more tech. Well, we have a lot of taxable catch up until next Saturday. I think we've encroached into Mr. Shopping Territory. Oh, okay. Well, okay, we've got... Ladies and gentlemen, we'd love to hear. from you on the mystery shopping report and your vote is extremely important so take advantage

of that in Texas at 772-497-6530 and rate the mystery shopping report from Smile Mazda of Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Okay, Smale Mazda of Greenberg, Pennsylvania.

This week we bring you another very long distance, mystery shop and the final chapter. of our five-part Mazda dealership expose. We've never done this in the 20 years of this show, mystery shopping reports every week, but we've never done five of the same make in a row, and certainly not in different states.

So we've gone from Florida to Tennessee to Pennsylvania. Very exciting and very rewarding, and we talked earlier on the show if you just tuned in about getting this information to Mazda because they can look at five dealers in different locations in the country and see how different their way of retailing cars is. And it's got to be of interest, you would think, to Mazda. By the way, I was the first Mazda dealer in the eastern United States.

In 1970, we were the first, yeah, each of the Mississippi. And this dealership here, we found out, Nancy researched this, was actually founded in 1968. So this Greensburg, Pennsylvania, Smale Mazda, been around for a long, long time. So who do we do? And excuse me, their father was in the automobile business in 1936. So there's a lot of correlation here with you and this mystery shopperry report as far as the years that are similar. Okay, we shopped Southern Palm Mazda.

Mazda of Palm Beach Wallace Mazda of Murfreesboro, Tennessee and here we are in Greenwood, Pennsylvania. Very cool. The good Mazda dealer was the good,

the good, almost the only good dealer period, but the good master dealer was Nelson Mazda of Merfreesboro, Tennessee. These guys blew us away with their honesty, integrity,

and cutting-edge sales practices. And we gave me an A. I mean, I had to read the shot, after I first read it another time. I said, I must be missing something here, but no. Amazing job they did. In each case, Agent Lightning chose Mazda 3's popular, the lower price, I guess, Mazda is her target vehicle. In each case, with the exception of Nelson, the Mazda dealer used the inventory crisis as justification to charge her many thousands of dollars of MSRP. Now, Nelson, Mazda, the good guys, They charge right at MSRP.

And strangers that may sound, MSRP is not a bad price today. It's a good price in many cases. So they stuck to the morals and ethics, even though they could have charged a lot more. It wasn't just that they were charging a lot for hard-to-come-by-vehicles, these other dealers. It was how they were doing it.

They were packing the prices with worthless, over-priced non-wanted items, and sneaking in large, bogus dealer fees. Well, all dealer fees are bogus, so it's just bad enough to charge a high price, but when you look a customer in the eye and say, look, shortage, high demand, low supply, this is the price. You might not like it, but if you don't buy the car, somebody else is going to buy it. At least that's being honest.

But when you sneak the prices in, after the fact, after the advertisement, that's where it really upsets us and should upset you too. Until Nelson Mazda bucked the trend, we were ready to believe this bad behavior was what we could expect from any Mazda dealership. Where Mastah dealers is just bad? We'd already made a similar conclusion about Nissan dealers and discussed the reasons for this on the show. I mean, Nissan dealers, we found, on the average, just are not pleasant places, partly because

Nissan dealers are abused by Nissan. And, you know, if you abuse somebody, they will abuse somebody else. It's the cycle of abuse. Yeah, exactly. But what Agent Lightning experienced in Tennessee forced us to rethink? Nelson Moss had not only refrained from overcharging, they use the true blue one-price, one-person sales process. No F&I department or boxes, it's called, the vernacular.

No sales manager. It was transparent and pressure-free. I mean, can you imagine walking? into a store like Target and talking to a salesperson and then you had to talk to two other people or three other people before you could buy your product. That's the average dealership. We don't do that. When Nelson Mazza doesn't do that.

So Agent Lighting traveled to the Pittsburgh area, La Trobe, to be exact, to see if Smale Mazda could redeem the greater, a monster dealer body. Now, Pittsburgh area has got a lot of small towns, Greensburg, as well. one of them and there are a lot of other little towns around there. I think because Smale Mazda has been around so long, they may have identified with Greensburg before the geography changed. He grew up around him because he's been around since 1968. 88. It was 88. I just checked on the site. I think, yeah, it's hard to read. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah, when was Mazda? When was Greensburg? Mazda, 1988. Okay, I'm sorry, I thought I misread it. Okay, I read 1968, not to go over you, but 1968, 1988, and then I went back, and then we got another date, 1936, when their fathers... Oh, yeah, they have a large auto group, they added Mazda in 1988. Okay. Okay.

Remember this show is about, we call it redemption, because we're trying to have an influence on the buying public out there to recognize the dealers that are more pleasant in the way they retail you a car. And we're trying to persuade the dealers to recognize the customers will recognize them. And we're seeing a little change here. So we get very, very happy when we find dealers like Nelson and Schmiel. I arrived at, I'm speaking the first person as a fiber agent lightning, and here's the report. I arrived at Smale Mazda in the late afternoon, I entered the new car showroom. I looked around and saw that no one wore masks. I was the only one.

Now, you know, I got, my blood pressure went up when I read this this morning, but I guess I've got to remember this is a show about cars, it's not a show about other things, and COVID and wearing masks and vaccinations. there should be another show on that but I think it's wrong Is it wrong especially because Allen Ganey County has a very high COVID rate right now Yeah yeah

It's going up So we've got to stick to what we know And it's cars and so We're not counting the mask wearing As part of the scoring I feel like I should but Hey what can I say I was greeted by a man who asked

What he could do for me I told him that I was there to buy A New Monster 3 The man explained that he was currently in the middle of the sale, but he would get Lloyd to help me. Lloyd, who was seated nearby, heard his name, got up from his desk, walked over to me, offered his hand. I reluctantly shook it.

I mean, whatever happened to the fist bump or the elbow bump, you know, you would think, as Stu just said, that county has got extremely high COVID rates. Why would you want to be touching a stranger that wasn't wearing a mask? And the salesperson was not wearing a mask. But he stuck his hand out anyway. Then, Lloyd led me back to the desk he came from. Boy, he spent some time getting my information entered into the computer. I gave him my cover story while he typed.

I said I was in the process of moving back to Pennsylvania after a divorce. I had everything handled except a car and a Pennsylvania driver's license. I said, I had an appointment of the Department of Motor Vehicles to get my license on Friday morning the next day. I think I like about Agent Lightning is our cover stories are excellent I'm always surprised

I never know what I'm going to get I told Lloyd that I'd settle on getting a monster three I said I'd no luck finding a good deal while I was in Florida I decided to pause my car search

until I was resettled in La Trobe Lloyd told me I selected a great car he said they had exactly two in stock then he went on to explain all the shortages

to me all the same things I've heard from every dealer on every mystery shop in the last six months. I made the assumption this was the setup for the price gouging to come. You're like, here it comes, okay. We walked over to a red monster three in the showroom. I said it was the color I wanted. The MSRP was $30,265, and it wasn't an addendum label.

So that's pleasant surprise number one, really. I mean, no addendum label, at least in four. and a lot of other states, they all have a denim labels, jacking up the Monroney label price. Like Tennessee. Lloyd went over the car with me and suggested that we test drive

the other Mazda 3, which was parked outside. I told Lloyd that I drove so many Mazda 3s in the last months, a couple of months, which is true, and she has.

I mean, I have to ask, Agent Lightning, if she really likes the car. She sure. She does like it. She says it's a great car, yeah. Yeah.

I would rather cut to the chase to see the deal he could come up with. I've driven a bunch of them. Don't need to do it again. We sat back at the desk and discussed payment options. I told him I planned to pay outright in cash from my divorce settlement, then Lloyd went to his manager to get the numbers. At six minutes, he was back with a worksheet. Wow, I mean, usually 15 is the shortest average time I've seen. We had 30 minutes.

In 30 minutes, yeah. That's just not right to keep a customer waiting on. well that's why she times it like she will she'll just check her watch and she gives us a precise thing and it's also kind of funny that it's you know it's well you know it goes back to old school I mean that's the way the car business arrived when I was beginning of the business that was part of the strategy keep them there as long as you can wear them out wear them down don't give them their keys don't give their driver's license keep up keep on finally out of frustration they buy a car I

I mean, that's the insane, cruel theory that this, making the customer wait. Any other business, you don't want to make the customer wait. Anyway, six minutes, great. The top line labeled market value, selling price, standby, was MSRP. Okay. $30,000, $625. It wouldn't be okay any other time except during the COVID pandemic, but if you buy a car today and MSRP, you're getting a pretty good deal.

The automotive news story said that two-thirds of the car sold, the United States now, are over MSRP. And they added to the MSRP of 3625 a $279 discount. Wow. And then they added back, unfortunately, a $394 dock fee, which is a hidden fee. and it says it's a dealer fee and it is what it is. So effectively there are $115 over in the circuit. Which is trumped change compared to what the thousands of the average deal is charging.

So it's still a good price. Don't like the dealer fee. Don't like dealer fees, even small dealer fees, but it is what it is and all dealers do it virtually. I asked Lloyd if he could give me a better discount. He said the only thing he could do was to apply a loyalty rebate and I asked if I owned any other Mazda's. Now, other dealers

would have applied to loyalty rebate already in the fine print. And then they have to take it away from me in the advertised price. But not so. Alas. Yeah. So, of course, I said I don't own one, so I didn't get the discount, which is, again, credit to Smyth Mazda.

I told him that this price for the whole experience was so much better than what I'd gotten from the floor, to Monaster dealerships, Lloyd and I discussed when I could come back after getting my license. I told him I still needed to sleep on it before committing to a deal, and he said he understood. Lloyd walked me to the door. I said, I'd be in touch. And that's the story. It was just an honest, transparent, teeny-weeney-dealer fee, no price-couching. The big negative was no one wore a mess, but, you know, we're in the car retail recommendation business, and that's a different the ball game. So it's time

for your votes and I love to hear what all of you think about this. I've got a vote in mind and I think most of us here have got a vote in mind what is your vote and let's start counting them. All right, I still don't have any grades coming in from

our listeners yet but I will just I had a vote in my grade in mine anyway. I'm thinking an A minus they can't get an A because the dealer fee in my mind. D.C. can't get a straight A. But A minus for me, I think they did a good job.

Jonathan Wellington comes in and gives him a B-minus. He says the dealer fee lost the A for him as well. So he's giving a B-minus. Okay. You got anything over there, Rick? So far, I've got just Mark from St. Louis, Mark Anderson, with a B-plus. Here's

Negan with a B-plus, and Tim Gilliland with a B-plus. And it looks like that's what we've got so far. Oh, Wayne coming in with an A. Woo. So I'm going to kind of follow the flow and give it the A minus kind of halfway in between them. I agree with Stu.

The dealer fee kind of was a little letdown that they did slip that in. But the rest of, hey, RICO West, A minus, but he's making common. He dropped it because of the no masks. Yeah, I forgot about that. You make mine a B. I'm lowering mine. Mark Smith with a B plus and Mark Ryan with an A minus. refreshing that there are some good dealerships Brian Sidlako with a B

and that looks like our account for today for YouTube we got more coming in on Facebook Linda gives them a B Martha gives them a B then Robert gives them an A plus if they were in this market let me say this about their dealer fee of $394. The hidden fee, the sin

of the hidden fee is not so much charging it is hiding it and when you hide it in an advertisement, for example in Florida, it's actually against the law. But dealers do it anyway. They get away, they say, well, I'm not hiding it because they have a fine print, but that's silly. They're camouflaging it.

They're hiding it. In this case here, there was no advertisement, and so they just simply added it. And he goes, here's the price. So we don't like the dealer fee, but it's not a mortal sin until you hide it in the advertised price along with your other fees like the nitrogen tires. Anytime you say you can buy a car in your Facebook ad, your YouTube ad, or whatever, newspaper, television, and you say you can buy that price, and then when you come in, you find out that it's actually a thousand dollars or only $394 higher, that's where the

sin happens. Nancy, what are your scores looking like? What a great dealership, first of all. And Bud, his nickname, passed away. The owner passed away, I believe in 2018, Stukin confirmed that. And he received a, what was it? He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pennsylvania Automakers Automotive Association. So what a great family, family owned and operated.

But I have to give them a B, and the B is because of the, well, dealer fee and no mess. And that's my answer. That's my vote, B. Yeah, I'm keeping mine at a B, but I do agree with you 100% on the dealer fee and how it's used. So in this case, it says, no, that's not to say we could have done another mystery shop of Smell Mazda. started with an advertisement that she found on that agent line found online and then it would be a different situation. But I keep mine the same because I also had forgotten about the masks. And I'm not trying to preach to Allengany County, but it's not a good time to go maskless.

I second now. So what's the final grade there? I'm going to give up a May. I think they're so far ahead on the curve of any dealer other than Murphysboro. that I would have to give Mnay. I think if they'd advertise the price, then it'd be a different story and then it popped a hidden fee on top of it.

Not only is small, but it wasn't really hidden. It was disclosed to Agent Lightning before she bought the car and before she was going to buy the car. And I'll say this about dealer fees too. Dealer fees have been around since I started the business. My father, when I came to work for him in 1960,

had a $6.50 dealer fee. So it's part of the culture and part of the way cars have been sold for over 50 years. And I'm not trying to make excuses because what they've done is they've really prostituted the dealer fee and turned it into an evil, deceptive thing. A dealer fee that you see up front is one thing. A dealer fee that has grown to thousands of dollars.

We have dealers in South Florida charging. $2,000 and $3,000 in hidden fees, not to mention the dealer-installed accessories, which are also added after the fact, after the advertised price. So dealer fees is not such a sin as how you use it to deceive the customer. And I don't think that Smythe Mazda was using their dealer fee to deceive the customer, Rick. Well, I've got one last one here. cram 1624 says wait until she goes back to buy. I guess he's taking the side of the devil's advocate

wondering if maybe they might try something after maybe in the box or something. Well, he raises a good point because I talk to Sue and Nancy about this all the time. You never know exactly what that price and what deception and what you're going to have to face until you actually buy the car. Go through the finance contract.

go through the installment sales process, go through the product sales, until you sign on the dotted line and drive that car off the lot, you'd never know what the price is. Some of the sneakiest, nastiest things happen in the finance department. And we don't get into the finance department that often, partly because we'd have to buy the car. And if you buy the car, then you have to dispose of the car. We should do that. We can't do it every week because it would get too costly. But it's something we should do more of. Yeah.

We had more grades coming in. We had a husband and wife team, Bob and Mrs. Bob, disagreed. Bob gives him a B. Mrs. Bob gives him an A. And Mark gives him a B plus. Oh, by the way, I wanted to make a clarification for Mark. Mark brought up something when we were talking about painting materials, and I think it was misunderstood.

He wasn't speaking about the fee that's at the end of the invoice. He's talking about how it's broken out on the estimate, and that is on the estimate and the price. So paint materials is a line item when you give a quote, a body shop quote. It's required by the insurance department, by the insurance company. And so the dealer is, a body shop has got nothing to do with that. It's up to the insurance. Right. But I'm saying, like on a retail, if it did go through service, you would show them,

it would be broken down paint materials and all the other items alike. The scent of the insurance company is they're trying to get the dealer to reduce the costs, and they typically under-allow on painted materials. I've got one last quick question here from M. Fisher. He says, is shopping for a car using the Costco buying program still worth it? Absolutely. You're going to pay a high price, but it'll be the lowest high price, yet you'll pay. If you're a Costco program in today's inflated market, will be high, but there'll be the lowest price from the market.

That's right. Okay, so we're not all caught up, but we have some, some text, some anonymous feedback to get to you next Saturday. It's a great show. Where are we going on time? Okay, ladies and gentlemen. Yes. As Stu said, we'll get to those other taxes and anonymous feedback

next week to all of you. Thank you for tuning in, Earl Stewart on cars. And we want to thank you and well, have a wonderful weekend. And I hope that we helped you in many ways with all the information from

us and from our callers. See you next week. All right, everybody.