I bought my 24 2500 AT4 from Laura GMC last June…at the time there was NO discounts whatsoever and Laura wouldn’t honor my GMC Suppliers discount ..so I paid full sticker (76.5k) for my truck.
It’s amazing what a difference a few months can make. U.S. vehicle manufacturers have always overproduced the market. With few exceptions (like a few specialty sports cars and trucks), the time window of demanding full MSRP and/or additional dealer markup is short, because the manufacturers eventually build enough to tip the balance in favor of increasing inventories. Trucks sitting on car lots cost them money, so the deals start flowing and, with time, rebates, promotional financing, and other incentives start appearing.
A couple cautionary notes: Before I bought my HD AT4X AEV diesel I considered buying a similarly equipped Ford Tremor. I couldn’t find any nearby, so I searched nationally and found several at a large dealer in Tampa. The advertised prices were good, so I was interested and I started digging for the total “out the door price”. They had a ridiculous list of expensive add-on charges and requirements I had to pry out of the salesman. The advertised price did not include the $995 “doc fee*”, a “prep fee” of several hundred dollars (above the dealer prep on the monroney sticker), and it didn’t mention other dealer add-ons nobody should ever pay for. To get the advertised price you also had to finance the vehicle through the dealer (because that’s worth another few thousand bucks). I didn’t want or need any of it.
* “doc fee” is a dealer invention that arrived in the early 90s and spread across the country like wildfire. Apart from the DMV fees and sales tax, which are always listed separately, the actual cost of processing the paperwork for vehicle sale is about 8 to 10 minutes of clerk-time. Assuming slow, old, distracted clerks with ample breaks, a clerk can still process three or four of these transactions per hour. If the clerks are paid $40 per hour (they aren’t), and they get another $20 per hour in benefits (they don’t), the maximum cost per transaction for the dealership is about $20. It probably averages closer to $10 per vehicle. It’s ridiculous to charge $200 for that, much less $995 as the Tampa dealer does.
When the “doc fees” first appeared on my sales contract they were small, I refused to pay them, and the dealership removed the fee. Thirty years later they are “standard”. How do you think the dealership sales manager would react if his doctor/lawyer/dentist/electrician started tacking on a doc fee at the end of his bill? The doctors and dentists have about twenty times the paperwork associated with each transaction, and their billing team has to keep generating bills on the same account for months. Why don’t they charge for that? The answer is they do. It’s just part of the pricing structure, as it always has been in the car business. The car dealers just decided they wanted even more profit. They couldn’t modify the legally required factory Monroney sticker and “additional dealer markup” sounds bad, so they inserted things like “doc fees”, undercoating, nitrogen filled tires, and other imaginary benefits.
Before long we’ll see “detail fees”, “janitorial fees”, and “electricity surcharge” to pay for dealership lighting at night…. Sheesh.
