As I said earlier, the rubber was to meet the road this afternoon in the case of righteous honest consumers (us) vs. Big Behemoth Asshole Car Dealership (them).

I did a little research this afternoon and found out a few things, but the biggest thing was that, errors on the contract or not, we had "taken delivery" of our new car and if push came to shove big time, the dealer could tell us to suck on it and stick us with the whole thing. Our only hope was that we play it cool and hope that they discovered (or at least felt like) that they had stepped on their dicks in this case, if only a little bit.

On the way home, I also got some valuable advice from Unk Todd a.k.a. The B-I-L. He reminded me that actually money on the price isn't the only compensation you can ask a car dealer for in situations like this. You can also ask for various services to be rendered at no charge.

Knowing that, the wife and I decided the following (time for some algebra):

Our old payments added up to X dollars.
The new payment on my Trailblazer plus the new van were to have netted out to be X+31.00
The payment they came to was X+71.00

We wanted them to make that gap right, or at least dent it a good ways.

My wife did the talking early for fear that I might go off on a Tourette's jag and just unload on the guy. She did a great job.

The guy's point was basically that, while they wanted to "make this as right as they could," we both needed to "acknowledge some responsibility for the situation we found ourselves in."

At that point, the wife said "This is the fourth car we've bought from this dealership, and I took your employee's word that the VIN information and related prices and dollar figures were correct and accurate. I trusted you for that, and that was clearly a mistake by me."

ZING!!!!

The guy sort of looked at us, and while meekly defending their position, more or less realized where we were all at right then.

Then I said "Look, we can all take or not take as much blame as we feel like, but at the end of the day, we told your salesman what we wanted to do, he told us that's what he'd done to arrive at the price we got, and now we sit here with an error of around forty five bucks. Since that's more than 13% of the monthly payment, we need to see how we can bridge that gap."

In the leasing / buying world, for the most part, 20 bucks in payment is around a thousand dollars financed. My hope was that, at worst, they'd come off for half of the difference.

He said they'd be willing to take all profit from selling our vehicle (allegedly $785) and apply that to our trade. We sat silently as he calculated.

He said "That brings the total prices back down to X+15.00 and change. How's that?"

Deadpan as I could offer, I said "That's almost half, so why don't you throw in a year's worth of oil changes and we'll call it even?"

He wrote the coupon for that on the spot, and when it was all said and done, we walked out at X+$19.00, which is close enough for government work and, in my opinion, showed that they were at least willing to work to make this right.

That doesn't excuse their bullying tactics, their bait and switching with our old car and all of the other cliche'd car dealer smarmy salesman bullshit tactics. That was all wrong.

It also doesn't leave us knowing how we are going to fill out their survey. You know, the one they tell you about over and over again that, if you don't give them perfect scores on, people can and will be fired, killed, maimed, tortured, or forced to eat lead paint, or worse.

As I said, we are ultimately pretty satisfied with the result, but how we got there felt similar to how Andy Duphrane felt escaping from Shawshank when he "crawled to freedom through five-hundred yards of shit smelling foulness I can't even imagine, or maybe I just don't want too. Five-Hundred yards... that's the length of five football fields, just shy of half a mile."

But hey, it's better than having to tell Lauren that we didn't have the car with the television in it anymore. I'd rather pluck my own eyes out and sell plasma while working nights at IHOP than do that.

I love you punkin. Enjoy your terrible kids shows on DVD in car. With mommy. I can't listen to them.