Had a quite unpleasant situation happen to me and the GF yesterday at a local MB dealer here.

Context: after a few months of mulling, GF and I are ready for a GLS450. We want something with more space as her parents are immigrating here and so should be a comfortable enough ride for 4 adults with a dog.

We go to a dealership approx 10km away from our residence. Find a sales agent, do a test drive. Go back to his desk, get given the speech on how these are in very high demand... unfortunately not much of a rebate off MSRP ($1000?) which is strange since on a prior and cheaper GLC43 i got a larger discount but anyway, taking the salesman at his word and so agreeing to what he priced it out as and decided to finance instead of lease the car.

Starts taking my info, driver's license etc. Have my CC ready for the initial deposit and apparently car should be ready for us in under a week.

Salesman then goes to confirm everything with the sales manager and that's when it got really weird and awkward for us...

We get given a speech on how these cars are notorious for being exported. Fine, it is what it is. Salesman says we may be required to sign a no-export clause as part of the contract - happy to do so.
But then that wasn't enough. I believe the manager got extra greedy and started to discriminate on us based on.... our age.

We are in our early 30s. We live downtown. Both of those are red flags according to the salesman who is spewing out whatever the manager told him. Finally there is a dealership that is a few km closer to us - why oh why did we venture a few extra kms to this dealership instead of the one closer to our home. He starts saying the only way we can finance this car is if we leave $25,000 as a deposit for 6 months? There is a reason why we priced out the finance option @ $0 down (we are not giving them capital like that interest free) and so we absolutely were not ready to agree to them locking in $25k for 6 months.

So salesman said his hands were tied and the only way they would "sell" to us would be with a lease, again all because of his manager saying he doesn't want us to export the car after buying it (even though we are financing it!).

We feel discriminated upon and honestly this has left a very bad taste in our mouths with respect to service from this dealership's manager. He didn't even come talk to us or anything just looked down at us from his 2nd floor office.

Is there any recourse here? Should i email corporate @ MB and take it from there? Possibly take legal action on the dealership?

Thanks in advance.

 

Don't waste your time or energy on a business that chooses not to do business with you. Not sure there is much legal ground here unless you can prove discrimination so I'd simply take my business elsewhere to a dealer that will be happy to take your money and sell you the vehicle you want. In the end, would you rather be right or would you rather be happy? Save yourself the negative energy and chalk it up as a bad experience but linger no longer. Contacting corporate MB would definitely be a good idea as well, if for no other reason than to let them know how bad your experience was.

 

Walk...or run! Very bad business practice, inexcusable. There are other dealers that will gladly take your money, and smile doing so. Not sure what was going on but it seems like they don't want to sell you the car. Maybe promised to someone else? You should out the dealer here so others know to stay clear. I would follow up with a call the MB corporate.

 

Is this not a regular practice in Canada?
Isn't there a discussion somewhere in the forums about it?

 

What country are you in?

 

Apparently yes, and yes.

 

Thanks for the responses all - i'm in Canada. Could not located other said thread to see if possibly it's even the same dealership we are talking about here...

 

https://mbworld.org/forums/gle-class...y-deposit.html