Car Shopping Sucks - Until You Find Your Car

Boxes Packed:  6 (23 total) + 1 half packed
Sharpies Used Up:  0
Rolls of Packing Tape: 1

With the move to Ontario at the beginning of July rapidly approaching and the plan to drive across the country as part of the move falling into place, one critical piece was still outstanding - Andrea and I did not have a car.  So we decided to spend this weekend taking a look at various dealerships to see if we could find anything we liked.

We started out Saturday morning at a Ford dealership (I have a discount with Ford through Ernst & Young), and test-drove a new Ford Focus.  I never thought I'd be entertaining the idea of buying a Ford, but we both found the new Focus hatchback to be a great car and had fun test-driving it (even though the salesman decided to come with us).  In the end, though, the discount wasn't as great as we'd hoped, and the Focus ended up being a bit more than we wanted to spend.

From there we went on to two different Toyota dealerships.  Both were owned by the same person, but I was surprised at how different the service was between the two.  At the first, we initially told the salesman that we were looking to buy used, and were looking at either a Matrix or a Yaris.  The salesman completely ignored us, and from there spent his time trying to get us to buy a brand new Yaris.  Now these cars are supposed to be small and economical, but by the time he was done with his sales pitch, the car was priced at over $21,000 - for a Yaris!!!  Quite the change from when Andrea got her first Yaris in 2007.

The second Toyota dealership had much better service, but unfortunately had only two used cars that we were interested in - one was an older Matrix that had already been sold, and one was a 2009 Yaris that we were very interested in.  After discussing the Yaris with the salesman, we decided to take another day to look around before starting to make any decisions.  It was a busy Saturday, and Andrea and I ended the day feeling very disappointed and frustrated.

Sunday started out quite a bit better - despite the black clouds, the rain held off and we headed to the Richmond Automall to continue our shopping.  Our first stop was another Toyota dealership, and the day seemed to start off with another pushy salesman that wasn't initially listening to us.  However, he turned out to be quite helpful, and after Andrea and I had a look at their used inventory, he went off searching for the car we wanted to look at - a 2010 Matrix that had just come back on a lease.  Apparently some other salesman had hidden it on the lot, but after about 20-25 minutes, our wonderfully helpful salesman had found the car.  Andrea and I both knew pretty quickly that this was the car for us, and left about an hour later with a signed sales agreement!

All we had hoped was that Sunday would be a better car-shopping day than Saturday, and that's exactly what happened.  Although we didn't go out expecting to buy a car, we're both really excited to have that crossed off of our to-do list, and can't wait to pick up the "Silver Bullet" tomorrow!