If dealerships are known for being shady, why can’t they learn a thing or two about properly handling customers so that they’re experience isn’t so bad and to ensure they don’t get scammed?
I've known people who worked at car dealerships over the years. With rare exceptions dealerships are focused on short term gain; how much money they can extract out of every mark walking through the door by hook or by crook. The philosophy at all too many dealerships is that there is a sucker born every minute and after they burn one there will always be another to take to the cleaners. Their worst nightmare is an educated consumer.
Because they think that it is more profitable not to.
Because most of them have lots of overhead expenses and somewhat greedy.
Somewhat???
They have no incentive to do quality work, be honest or fair. Their only motivation is profit. And when you go in for a simple oil and filter change at an inflated price, they will undoubtedly find or create far more expensive repairs you need to take care of immediately, at your expense, of course.
They have a choke-hold on the market. They know you can't go anywhere else, and anytime you have a situation where a merchant know you have limited choices, that position is inevitably abused. It's human nature to act in self interest, and to be only as honest as the situation requires. When push comes to shove, few of us are above this principle. (and especially not the ones who speak/act self-righteously).
There are always less reputable people at dealers or independent. Dealers get a bad rep for recommendations of maintenance that weren’t common practice on older vehicles which in turn makes people judge them as rip offs and take there vehicles to independent facilities and think they’re winning.. but at the end of the day open your manual more often than not these are factory recommended services so when you take a car to the dealer these are the rules that they need to abide by and intervals in which things are recommended to prolong the life of the vehicle so not taking the car back to the dealer doesn’t make the services any less recommended or required. A lot of reputable dealers get a bad reputation based off of people that don’t understand that. At the dealer level they cannot stray from factory set intervals. And dealers have all the incentives to do quality work because they are held to a higher standard and dealer employees at most all levels are paid based on there quality of work performed. Don’t mean to rant but not all dealers are crooks or ripoffs there is bad seeds in all professions
No, they are not all crooks. The problem is that 99.9% of them make the other 0.1% look bad.
The last honest dealers were the AMC ones imho
I don't know, they had to pawn those horrid Renault Alliances and other Renault junk on people towards the end. Still, with AMC's small market share the dealers could not afford to be quite so cavalier about pissing off customers as the big guys.