Women often have negative car buying experiences.
Ladies: are you nervous about buying a car? Do you hate the thought of shopping for one? Then this blog post is for you. It has to do with discrimination against female car shoppers, and now more than ever it’s important to talk about this issue, and deal with it head-on. Take a look at this article: The Gender Gap in Car Buying. It describes the experiences of editors Phil Reed and Carmen Tellez (writing for Edmunds.com) at several dealerships. They visited at different times so they would not be seen together, and documented the way in which they were treated by the staff. Take a minute to skim the article; then let’s consider its implications.
At the time this article was written, women bought or influenced eighty-five percent of all the new trucks and cars sold in the USA. Yet as you just observed, Phil and Carmen had remarkably different experiences at several of the dealerships they visited. Why is it that the prime targeted audience (female shoppers) is also the one treated with less respect, and taken less seriously? Phil was quoted a fair price on an Elantra, but the salesman lied to Carmen about the price: she would have been charged about $2,000 more than Phil. Although Phil and Carmen both enter one of the dealerships with apparent interest, only Phil is approached by a salesman and given a card. Only one of the dealerships actually passed their test for treating them both with respect.
One explanation for this problem is that some salesmen assume female buyers don’t know much about cars. This means a slick sales rep thinks he can take advantage of this lack of knowledge to cajole a potential female client into buying what he wants her to buy. For example, although Carmen specifically said she was interested in a champagne colored stick shift, the salesman told her he only had a white manual, and tried to pressure her into buying it.
Another possibility is that women can be stereotyped as the less aggressive, more easily manipulated demographic, as compared to supposedly more car-savvy, confident male buyers. In some instances this may be true, and this is due partly to the fact that female buyers anticipate road blocks and rocky sales negotiations when they set out to find their next vehicle.
The good news is that out of this bias towards male clients, efforts have been redoubled by intelligent, thoughtful car sales people who recognize the importance that female buyers have in the car market. There are now more online sites (such as this blog, and my website) whose purpose is to educate female car shoppers and help them be more comfortable and confident with the process. More and more companies also now require sensitivity or non-discrimination seminars as a standard part of a sales rep’s training. And as more people treat female and male car shoppers equally, I suspect that we female car buyers can have a bright car-buying future ahead of us.
