Why we post the price

There is a version of this business where the price is a starting position rather than a fact, and it is, by almost any measure, the more profitable version. We know this because we have watched it work. A car with no number on it produces a phone call, and a phone call produces an appointment, and an appointment produces a person standing on a lot on a Saturday with two hours invested and a child getting bored in the back seat. By the time a number is finally said out loud, it is being said to someone who has already spent something that cannot be refunded. That is not a trick, exactly. It is just what happens when you withhold the one piece of information everyone came for.

We decided not to do that, and it is worth being honest that the decision was not purely a moral one. It was partly that we are small. Six cars at a time does not support a floor of people whose job is to manage a negotiation for ninety minutes. The economics of a short line are different: we need the person who is right for the car to find it quickly, and we need the person who is wrong for it not to spend their Saturday discovering that. A posted price does both. It is, among other things, an efficiency.

But the honest reason is the one underneath that. When you price a car in private, you are not really setting a price — you are running an assessment. You are reading a person's clothes and their questions and how badly they seem to need a car this week, and you are producing a number shaped by what you think they will accept. Two people can stand in front of the same vehicle on the same afternoon and be told two different things about what it costs. The industry has a comfortable vocabulary for this, and none of that vocabulary makes it something other than what it is. The people who do worst in that system are reliably the people who can least afford to.

The objection we hear most often is that posted pricing just means the price is higher, because the dealer has to build the negotiation in. That is a fair suspicion and it is sometimes true. It is not true here for a structural reason: a price that is meant to be checked is a price that gets checked. Ours sits on a page next to five other cars, and anyone with a phone can put the year, the trim and the mileage into a search bar while standing in front of it. A number set to survive that scrutiny cannot be padded, because padding it is instantly visible. The discipline is external. We didn't invent it and we can't relax it.

What posted pricing genuinely costs us is not margin. It is the ability to rescue a bad buy. When we pay too much for a car at auction — and we do, a few times a year, because everyone does — the traditional escape route is to find a buyer who won't notice. That route is closed. A car we overpaid for sits on a page at a number the market can see, and it does not move, and the longer it doesn't move the more the floorplan interest eats. Eventually we reprice it in public, which is a small humiliation performed in front of everyone, and we take the loss. That is the actual price of the policy, and it is paid by us rather than by whoever walked in that day.

There is a second cost, subtler and more annoying. Posted pricing makes you look expensive to people who are comparing you against numbers that aren't real. An advertised price elsewhere that excludes a reconditioning fee, a dealer prep charge, a mandatory accessory package and a documentary fee will always beat an honest number on a screen. We lose those comparisons constantly. We have no good answer to it except to publish what the out-the-door figure will be and hope the person doing the comparing reads far enough to notice that ours is the only one that includes everything.

None of this makes us unusually virtuous. It makes us a specific kind of business that has decided its scarcest asset is not margin per car but the willingness of a stranger to believe a number. Those are genuinely different things to optimize for, and a lot of perfectly decent dealers optimize for the first because that is how the industry is built and because rent is due. We are not claiming otherwise. We are claiming that the second is available, that it costs something real, and that we have chosen to pay it.

The test of whether any of this is true isn't a paragraph on a website. It is whether the figure you're told on the phone is the figure on the windshield, and whether the figure on the windshield plus tax, title, registration and the documentary fee is the figure at the bottom of the contract. Three numbers, and they should all be the same number. If they ever aren't, we have written something here that we didn't mean.

A price you have to extract from someone is not a price. It's the outcome of a negotiation you were enrolled in without being asked.