Filing a complaint with Corporate Toyota?

Well at least they took care of you and fixed it.

When my Dodge truck had an air conditioner evaporator unit fail 2000 mikes past wsrranty, the Chrysler ombudsman basically gave me the middle finger even they knew there were many, many failing.

 

Every car dealerships yelp reviews are bad. I've worked for 3 major Toyota retailers in just about every sales capacity. I have never heard of someone selling a vehicle that had a deposit on it, so if that truly happened, that's really shitty of them. Of course you should have had the first right of refusal. Maybe the salesperson just didn't care, and told his boss he called you when in fact he didn't. That's probably not something you thought about, or care about, but that shit happens every day. Most salespeople barely make any money and they suck. I could tell you stories you wouldn't believe about the incompetence of staff I've worked with.

If you really sent them an email with horrific language telling them about how you're posting this everywhere and they're "fucked", that's just laughable. I don't care what happened, that's just a silly thing to do. It's a car, they sold it to someone else, it's not the end of the world. If they did the same thing to you, let's say he forwarded that email to all the local Toyota GMs, what do you think would happen? You'd be having to go a lot further to buy that truck, do you care? Probably not. And neither do they.

When you say, "All they see is the dollar signs in front of their face instead of long term." I'm a bit dumbfounded. It's a business, of course it's about dollar signs. I still don't think they intentionally screwed you to make 4k, I think they saw the opportunity with another customer in front of them, someone said you weren't returning their calls, so they didn't want to lose both your deal and the other customer. Yes you steered a few people away, but maybe that guy that bought it steered a few people their way.

It's a shitty situation, and I certainly would have handled it better if it happened at my dealership, but clearly as I said there's more to this one than you let on to.

 

There's no capacity in the franchise agreement allowing them to be "punished" unless they violate a specific provision of the agreement. Unfortunately pissing off a customer isn't one of those provisions, I personally think it should be in certain situations. All they can really do is take away allocations. That happened to me a few years ago because we sold a bunch of 4runners to a guy who ended up exporting them, which is a franchise violation. They gave 5 of our allocations to another dealer, and they just swapped them back to us. The DM was pretty pissed about that.

 

Yeah, I never emailed them. All my communication was in person or over the phone. There's not more to it, but whatever I've got my truck and I know I'm pushing as much business away as I can.

As for dollar signs up front instead of looking long term, the strategy they're taking is going to cost them in the long term. If I had gotten the truck I put a deposit on, I would be recommending them, and when it came time to buy future vehicles, I'd probably go back. Now instead I'm driving anyone I know buying a Toyota away from them, I'll never even consider going back.

And even if this was caused by an incompetent sales person, I couldn't care less. Plus the bull shit response by their customer relations manager full of lies and petty insults speaks for itself. If I saw that on a dealership I was considering buying from, I'd probably think twice. Especially since he has the same shitty canned responses to every critical review.

 

Makes sense.

 

Ok, if you never sent that email then yeah, that's crazy. Probably pissed someone else off, got confused on who said what. Sounds like they're awfully disorganized. There's no excuse for that, I keep all the pissed off customers very well in order. They're like my pets.

 

There was a few other angry Yelp reviews all around the same time I posted mine. I don't know if it was one salesman creating a head ache for everyone or several failures at the same time. Most of the complaints were about people trying to buy a Tundra or a Tacoma. When I went there they referred me to their "Tacoma specialist" which was some kid who knew a little about the differences across the models but not much else. I think he was the same one people were referred to for Tundras as well.

 

The funny part is their yelp isn't that bad. Take a look at the #1 Toyota dealer in New England right here

http://www.yelp.com/biz/boch-toyota-norwood

 

Ouch.

 

haha! Love Yelp, had some shitty issues with a dealer here, I could not get anywhere
with it, just went round and round for over a month with the morons in sales, ONE Yelp
post and less than 2 hrs later, the "owner" was replying to me on there.