Stress pot called Delhi
Delhi’s potential for harassment at every level should find a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. If you are well-placed enough to own a car and, thus, escape abusive bus drivers and ruthless auto-drivers, you would think you are lucky.
But what about the harassment that comes your way when you decide to exchange your car for a new one? It starts something like this: First a true-value guy from one showroom calls you. Word spreads like wildfire and before you know, you are fighting to somehow take a break from your ringer with one showroom guy after the other calling you like there is no tomorrow.
You tell them to not call and they start behaving like a persuasion botox. “We will give you the best, we have added incentives, we can do better than whoever you are looking at...” The one-liners go on and on.
Fifteen days and innumerable showroom-wallahs later, you realise you have spent close to 240 hours on the phone with faceless bargainers trying to make you sell your good old car for peanuts. And there is another stark revelation: All of them, proferring a maze of confusing calculations, in the end are giving you the same old raw deal.
So you settle for reputation and go to the Capital’s best-known showroom which sports the tag of competent on the starched collars of its myriad sale agents.
You strike a deal with a baby-faced young agent who keeps you in good humour, offering you this+that+other only because “you are the best customer I have had so far.” It is, of course, another matter that he loves your ignorance about the market and its rates and is getting smug about your compliance to every demand. Then comes the true value wallah. He devalues your car from an assessment he gave 15 days earlier, saying it is policy. You do not argue and settle for whatever he is giving. After you deposit your old car with him and pay an advance booking for the new car, he calls you to say he needs Rs 1,000 to get an NOC from the financing bank and another Rs 2500 for getting the “hypothe-tication” removed. Staggered, you try to find out if it can get any cheaper. The bank takes just Rs 100 for the NOC and the Transport Authority tells you the cost would be Rs 370 which is due to a smart card that needs to be issued.
You go back and ask the guy why he tried to fleece you so blatantly and he gets edgy enough to say: “achchha chaliye aap ke liye main yeh sab khud kar loonga...” You tick him off in disgust only to become the victim of your baby-faced sales agent.
D-day arrives. You go to the showroom for your new car. Baby-face smiles from ear to ear, happy to get the draft and hand over the keys. But hold on, much after the invoice is made, the check-list given, all payments done and you are about to sit in the car and drive off, he comes running, saying “You need to pay Rs 3,000 more....”
But did we not seal the deal at a particular sum? Yes, we did but he miscalculated. So you go back into the showroom and ask him for the break-up. He gives it readily but says the x-amount of concession he promised earlier, he had not really bargained for it! But we came to an agreement over that didn’t we? “Yes, but no,” he tells you. After a three-hour argument, he agrees it is his mistake, hands over the keys and you drive off — too exhausted to appreciate your new buy which you had much earlier.
A day later, he is back on phone arguing that the cost of the car was actually what we told him it was but we have paid Rs 6000 less!
This, when at 44 degrees Celsius, we are at a roadside mechanic’s shop getting our new car repaired after a crazy driver drove his vehicle into it while backing in the parking!
But what about the harassment that comes your way when you decide to exchange your car for a new one? It starts something like this: First a true-value guy from one showroom calls you. Word spreads like wildfire and before you know, you are fighting to somehow take a break from your ringer with one showroom guy after the other calling you like there is no tomorrow.
You tell them to not call and they start behaving like a persuasion botox. “We will give you the best, we have added incentives, we can do better than whoever you are looking at...” The one-liners go on and on.
Fifteen days and innumerable showroom-wallahs later, you realise you have spent close to 240 hours on the phone with faceless bargainers trying to make you sell your good old car for peanuts. And there is another stark revelation: All of them, proferring a maze of confusing calculations, in the end are giving you the same old raw deal.
So you settle for reputation and go to the Capital’s best-known showroom which sports the tag of competent on the starched collars of its myriad sale agents.
You strike a deal with a baby-faced young agent who keeps you in good humour, offering you this+that+other only because “you are the best customer I have had so far.” It is, of course, another matter that he loves your ignorance about the market and its rates and is getting smug about your compliance to every demand. Then comes the true value wallah. He devalues your car from an assessment he gave 15 days earlier, saying it is policy. You do not argue and settle for whatever he is giving. After you deposit your old car with him and pay an advance booking for the new car, he calls you to say he needs Rs 1,000 to get an NOC from the financing bank and another Rs 2500 for getting the “hypothe-tication” removed. Staggered, you try to find out if it can get any cheaper. The bank takes just Rs 100 for the NOC and the Transport Authority tells you the cost would be Rs 370 which is due to a smart card that needs to be issued.
You go back and ask the guy why he tried to fleece you so blatantly and he gets edgy enough to say: “achchha chaliye aap ke liye main yeh sab khud kar loonga...” You tick him off in disgust only to become the victim of your baby-faced sales agent.
D-day arrives. You go to the showroom for your new car. Baby-face smiles from ear to ear, happy to get the draft and hand over the keys. But hold on, much after the invoice is made, the check-list given, all payments done and you are about to sit in the car and drive off, he comes running, saying “You need to pay Rs 3,000 more....”
But did we not seal the deal at a particular sum? Yes, we did but he miscalculated. So you go back into the showroom and ask him for the break-up. He gives it readily but says the x-amount of concession he promised earlier, he had not really bargained for it! But we came to an agreement over that didn’t we? “Yes, but no,” he tells you. After a three-hour argument, he agrees it is his mistake, hands over the keys and you drive off — too exhausted to appreciate your new buy which you had much earlier.
A day later, he is back on phone arguing that the cost of the car was actually what we told him it was but we have paid Rs 6000 less!
This, when at 44 degrees Celsius, we are at a roadside mechanic’s shop getting our new car repaired after a crazy driver drove his vehicle into it while backing in the parking!
Published May 3, 2009, Sunday Pioneer; http://www.dailypioneer.com/173495/Stress-pot-called-Delhi.html
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