Having a lot of trouble finding a reasonable price on a base Mini Cooper S.
Went to a dealer in SoCal today for a pepper white with bluetooth/ipod, and white turn signals.

24,666.66 otd can I easily do better?
The invoice on kbb is 21,310
Their price should be about 22,222
They earn about 900 dollars in profit...isn't this steep?

Any insight/tips are appreciated. Thanks!

 

900 is less then a 5% gross return on investment, low volume dealers need to make more than that to cover fixed costs and to stay in business.

A hi volume car like a toyota or honda can be bought for 500 to a 1000 over but a low volume franchise like mini needs to have a higher return per transaction to stay in business.

By the way I paid 25800 plus tax and tag for a new 2009 JCW

 

Interesting point I had not thought about. But at the same time, I haven't found any mini s models that aren't bloated with options that drive the price up. I think there would be a bigger market for mini if they would make more manual different colored stock minis. The manual issue might just be because I live in L.A.



[quote=By the way I paid 25800 plus tax and tag for a new 2009 JCW[/quote]

Consider yourself lucky

 

I think that must be it. When I test drove a MCS last year, my dealer (Mini of Monrovia) had over 20 on the lot, but only one was a manual. Silly.

 

Hard to find a auto in my neck of the woods

 

Did you try South Bay Mini? They are a MSRP dealer. Not sure which one you tried, but Bob Smith is ridiculous. Might also want to e-mail all the dealers and compare.

 

I ended up just taking the deal. The otd price was 24,666.99.
The finance guy wouldn't take off the 0.99. At least gave us floor matts ^^.
Thanks for the replies.

 

Congratulations on agreeing on a price; I think you did just fine!

As for:
You're not hearing the whole story!

 

Yeah, this guy and his family own a bunch of dealerships, and he got a good inside deal through connections. He likes to brag about the deal, without letting people know the real story - just plain rude, all it does is make people feel bad for not getting that price.

And he wonders why some dealerships get a bad name...


As for your deal - you did fine, there's not a lot of negotiating room on Minis. My local dealer will give $250 off to Costco members, that's it - and they sell Minis like crazy.

 

Really depends on the area too. In the NY Metro area there are at least 4 dealerships within 1 hour of eachother so 4 emails and you have 4 prices. Bring the lowest to your local dealer and they will beat it...usually.

HAPPY MOTORING!

Post some pics when you bring her home!

 

Well, at least he has a story, however skewed it may be-- there are those on NAM who claim ridiculous discounts on new cars, like one guy that said he got $1,000 below invoice on a ordered MCS--and when he got called out for BS one-upmanship, guess what? No reply. To get dime and above discounts on lot stock I can believe, but steep discounts on an ordered car? Yeah right. And I have an iceberg in Arizona I'd love to sell ya...

OP U did fine. There were times in S CA that you'd see markups on MINIs approaching $5K. Enjoy your new car.

 

I suppose some people get small discounts but it seemed to me when we purchased (Summer of 2009) MSRP with free floor mats was the standard deal.

For me the big attraction though was ordering a car EXACTLY the way you wanted it, if you are gonna pay MSRP or close to it, why bother with buying from dealer stock?

We were able to order my wife's base R56 with some nice specific options, but nothing at high cost (she didn't want the winter package originally but of course now loves the heated seats).

So we got out the door for under $22k, including $700 in sales tax, and some of the things we wound up with (Oxygen Blue, White signal lenses, rear spoiler, rotator spoke wheels, rear fog light) were not on ANY of the base MINI's on the lots (well one dealer had a couple of OB's, but they were both automatics).

You can't really factory order most cars anymore, other than domestics and then they act like you are some kind of crazy person to not want to buy off their lot.

Analogeezer

 

No, ALL dealerships have a bad name...but its not entirely the salesmans fault. Its a 100% commision job, but the boss's fire them for not making sales whent he boss demands too much profit.

Groceries stores have survived their entire existance on 3% profit margins, why is a car dealer any different?

 

In this market, dealers are discounting ordered cars -- even Porsches. But they certainly won't do it if you don't make a serious effort to negotiate.

Basically, you're giving them a "free" sale since they didn't have to commit their own funds to order an additional unit for inventory. The more sales they make, the easier it is to meet their quota and the more future allocations they earn...

 

Dealer pricing is what it is, when it comes to MINI's there seems to be little give, but as most of them are joint with BMW people who also don't seem to be very negotiable. So if we want our little fun wagons for the present we are going to have to pay. I got $500 off mine in a 2 day deal, Thursday and Friday, then back to sticker on Saturday. The sales mgr. decided to cut the price on some 09's Wednesday afternoon, then decided Friday that it wasn't a good idea and back up they went. I lucked out by 24 hours.