Keith's Odyssey to Planet Fitness: A diabolical chain of accountants

We got an offer from the Honda dealer to buy our Fit for (they say) 110% of current market value. Except they determine what that number is, and it will have only the loosest relationship to what the car is actually worth. They want to resell it, and it will be for more than they pay us, regardless of whatever the "market value" might be. So either the "market value" is unrealistically low, or they've found someone so desperate they're willing to pay more. I get that. Such cars are in high demand because they are a perfect city car. Great on gas, fit into tiny parking spots, reliable, lots of room in the back for stuff. Why ever would we want to sell a car that suits our needs so well?

But it got me thinking. What happens if we take them up on the offer? It generates several transactions, each at a profit for them or their staff, where there are no transactions now. One is buying our car, two is them selling that car, three is us buying a new car from them (they hope and will try hard to accomplish), or perhaps three is buying a used car from them which was made possible by transaction four, them buying that car from the current owner, who probably then had to buy another car. And maybe the person buying our car is in turn selling theirs. There could be a whole cascade of transactions out of it. I'm certain an accountant thought of the scheme, and can track the cost and profit of every bit of it to the penny.

While I'm on the topic, buying a car is a horrible experience, one of the worst because there's so much money involved. The first vehicles I saw on a Honda web site today was a CRV for $55,000. That is a large fraction of the amount of money we borrowed to buy this house. I'm pretty sure you don't have to look hard for a car or truck to cost the same as what we bought the house for, and you don't have to go to the exotic sports car showroom.

If you go to a dealer, you are facing experts in separating you from your money, and lots of it. They're much like the casino owners, they want it all. No matter what the sign on the car says, nobody outside the industry really knows what it actually costs to get the car onto the dealer's lot.

And then there's all the top up extras. It used to be that one could buy a car with a specific list of upgrades. You could get power steering but not power windows if you wanted it that way, though the more complicated the order the longer the delivery time might be. Now there are tiers of upgrades. If you want the nice leather seats, you're stuck with a sun or moon roof.

I firmly believe that cars long ago passed their optimal development and are now well into opulent degeneration. They are a tool for idiots to display to other fools that they are somebody because they drive X brand of car. We've designed a world where nearly everybody is forced to buy a car, and they are becoming less and less practical. Look in the next parking lot you drive past. How many big ass pickups are there? How many big SUV things? There might be a bunch of mini-van's but they aren't as common now, and really, how many people have a family that big? Cars like the Fit, or Civic, or their lookalikes are a minority.

I digress, back to sales. All that is before you get dragged into the finance manager's office for a pressure cooker round of finance options razzle-dazzle that normal people won't understand, and aren't given the chance to check the math. I was furious the one time we leased a vehicle, and I found out I had to buy the life insurance policy that they held on us, in case we died, so the car would be paid off. There was a similar one if we defaulted. I was THAT close to walking out on the deal. I told them that if they thought we weren't good for it, they wouldn't be leasing to us, and if they wanted to cover the risk, that was their choice. It got pretty acrimonious. I've never leased since, and I'm not likely to.

Then there is the undercoating, fabric protection, and chip guards, and god knows what else they've come up with to sell in the 8 years since we last bought a car.

Shall we talk about trading a vehicle in to buy a new one? They can structure the deal any way they want, looking like they're giving you a good deal there, and hiding where it's a really good deal for them. It's a pretty safe bet that they're going to do their best to get you coming and going, to say nothing of pushing you for a decision while you try to think about it.

All of which is being done to us by people who are trained to extract the maximum amount by hiding the truth with deceptive statements. It's a game to them. They know what buttons to push. They see dozens of people a day, and sell however many cars in a month, month in and month out. Most of the people you meet at a dealer are very good at their jobs. They have no shame. There are some dealers that fire the salesperson with the lowest sales. Even the guy that "slips you some inside info" or "warns you to watch out for x tactic" is in on the deal. If you're thinking that's like the dodgy 3 card monte game on a street corner with a shill helping to rope in the suckers, you are exactly right.

In contrast, in the past 50 years, here's the complete list of cars I've bought.

66 Ford Falcon used.

78 LeMans, new, it lasted about 150K Km.

83 Honda Accord hatchback new, (best car ever) 240K Km

95 Dodge Caravan, new, (the brutal leasing experience) 150K or so Km, we were fortunate to get out of it just before it totally gave up the ghost.

2004 Honda Accord, new, sedan, about 210K Km. It was still running well, but we could see some expensive repairs coming and bailed out.

2016 Honda Fit, new, current car with about 140K on it. So far so good.

I don't have many photos of the Fit, so you'll have to make do with a couple of already blogged photos.

The blog here has a couple photos of the Accord hatchback. I don't think I have any photos of the Falcon, LeMans, or Caravan.

So over 45 years or so, I've bought 5 new cars, and the industry had changed dramatically every time. No wonder I'm not particularly good at it, and fear getting fleeced. Since we bought the Fit, the industry has changed again. Where electric vehicles weren't common, they now litter the landscape, and there are now several varieties of them. I don't at the moment understand the pros and cons of the various choices but it seems like I'm going to have to. Even worse, one needs to understand how electricity is generated for your area. If it's from coal, all you're doing is trading emissions from you internal combustion engine for fly ash emissions from the coal fired generating station.

I completely believe that some of the things wrong with the world today can be laid at the feet of accountants and the fetish of believing that only things that can be measured are important. I was taught during economics class that the free market would deliver goods and services at a variety of price and quality levels, and the consumer could choose. Now it seems that the only criteria is price, and cheaper is better. What happens is a race to the bottom where the accountants doing their counting pennies and fractions of pennies, drive management to cut costs where ever they can.

That explains why the big meat packing plants do their own inspections, and sell tainted meat. Why powdered milk is cut with noxious, but cheaper fillers. Why bridges and other infrastructure fail because inspections and repairs are seen as expensive. Why the Walkerton water supply was contaminated with e coli, killing several people and sickening thousands. Why Facebook has perverted it's purpose from connecting people to selling advertising.

The accountants can't measure safety. They can't measure happiness, pride, joy, or the sense of belonging to a group working towards a greater purpose than an individual. They don't care about people, just numbers. They don't care that a business might have roots in the community; if the numbers don't look good as they think they should be, they'll dismember it and sell off the parts. To be fair to them, it isn't the accountants doing the dirty work of actually firing people. They've talked the managers into doing it for them. Some managers I've met didn't take much persuading; they liked laying off people.

Lots of what we see as economic activity is actually destructive, merely the manipulation of markets and the buying and selling of property for no reason but to privatize profit, and socialize loss. One example of many, is the billionaire sports franchise owners persuading the taxpayers to subsidize them as they build an ever bigger, newer, shinier play palace, or in other words, the monuments to their egos. If building such an edifice was a good financial deal, they wouldn't let anyone else in on it. Various levels of government fall for it, again and again, just like the sucker that thinks they know where the cards are.

More and more I get why people want to retreat from the world.

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