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My experience was just that- MY EXPERIENCE, and so...

My experience was just that- MY EXPERIENCE, and so, please don't take it as the big picture of Jim Ellis Mazda, which I am probably missing. Jim Ellis is better than most, which I why I gave then four stars, but the whole business of car buying and selling is..."nasty" is the first word that comes to mind, but it's more subtle than that, because the distortions of humanity that are played out there are generally accepted as "just the way things are", and so, not generally considered sensibly railed against. But I feel the need to speak up, and hey, they ASKED for my opinion.

I am not really wanting to blame anyone. I just want to say, hey, this whole process is insane, and here is why. This puts the responsibility both on the buying public, and the dealer. I will try to keep this focused on a meaningful critique of Jim Ellis Mazda in particular, but it WILL be in the context of my feeling about the industry in general.

I want to start by saying that every person I met at Jim Ellis, and at every dealer I went to in fact, in my buying process, were "good people". "Professionalism" is not the question here. Everyone every place I shopped was acceptably "professional" in my assessment.

My "problem" with...well, business in general, but with the car buying and selling industry especially, is that the people who work there are under tremendous pressure to be less than human. They are required to ACT as human as possible, and then, at the same time, required to limit their expression to forms that serve the profitability, first of all, of...if not the local company itself, the corporate monster-head that has set the policies that shape all goals and behaviors in a top-down hierarchical fashion. In other words "humanity" is a corporate POLICY if it is asked for at all, and in THAT form, it is just as much an affront to our natural sensibilities as Evil itself is.

The salesman must gain your trust as he is setting you up to be taken advantage of by the business office. He is not allowed to warn you off of THEIR final attack upon you, through their (the finance/business guy's/girls's) very skilled use of fear and confusion and the selective presentation of "facts". All of this with smiles all around, which is exactly what make the experience so crazy-making.

Jim Ellis does all this, but with more skill, and so, I am giving four stars to the effort they make, and the level of polish they have achieved, which is, apparently, the best a human can do in a dehumanizing world in which we are manipulated by the higher levels to act in this self-serving way, pretending that we agree that it is natural.

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