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Buy Back Program

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Another desperate sales letter from my favorite Automotive motivator.

Greetings to all my good friends in the car buying public! With the seasons changing, I’m here to remind you that there’s one sure way to stay warm when the weather turns cold – climb into a metal box and set off a rapid series of gasoline explosions mere inches on the other side of a plastic and foam barrier. I know it sounds crazy and dangerous, but if you do it right, you’ll be hooked! Here at Wally’s Intimida (home of the Sherpa – it’s a Mighty Big Car), we have a parking lot full of these polished, comfortable, new-smelling metal boxes all gassed up and ready for the spark of ignition, primed to blow heat on your feet, your middle and your face, all while you sit in your electrically warmed seat looking out the window and winter’s wrath! What’s more, if you pop your heated metal box it into gear, you could actually GO somewhere.

But if the prices scare you, don’t feel like you have to buy a new vehicle this year.

All the industry buzz is about the hot , hot market right now for used cars, and here at Wally’s we have those too! Want to buy used? C’mon down! Want to sell your old car on our mammoth, high traffic lot? All the better – c’mon down! We’ve heard from a lot of people this year who want to sell their pathetic jalopies and use the money to buy another, newer used car. Great idea! We’d love to help you do it with Wally’s Retail Detail Spiff n’ Jiff Program!

Here’s how the RDSNJ works – bring your dumb old clunker to our shop. We’ll buy anything! Then we’ll vacuum it out, wipe it off, polish it ‘til it’s star bright and cover it with a layer of wax so deep, it’ll look like it’s encased in glass. Then we’ll put your refreshed old friend on the lot and sell it for whatever the market will bear. And the market will pay top dollar for your rejuvenated jalopy, trust me.

How good will it look?

You’ll develop a serious case of Seller’s Regret! In fact, nine times out of some larger number I can’t remember right now, the sellers buy their loyal old companion BACK from us! After all, there was a reason you chose it in the first place – give us a chance to show you why! We promise we’ll let you have it for $150 more than we paid you for it – and believe me, that’s A LOT cheaper than buying new.

A bargain of one kind or another awaits you at Wally’s Intimida. It’s only a matter of degree. And a matter of degrees! Turn up the heat inside a metal box with gasoline explosions at Wally’s Intimida, home of the Sherpa S.U.V. It’s a Mighty Big Car!

Ever had Seller’s Remorse?

31 thoughts on “Buy Back Program”

  1. Wally, you lost me at “climb into a metal box and set off a rapid series of gasoline explosions mere inches on the other side of a plastic and foam barrier.” it’s 30 degrees outside and not much warmer in the house this morning. i’m dreaming of my drive in to Duluth later this morning – when i can turn the heater up high and benefit from all that “free heat” from those explosions going on so close by.
    to answer the question: not usually remorseful after i sell things, except there have been a couple goats i’ve sold and regretted it painfully.

    happy day discussing, All.

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  2. Morning all!

    “Seller’s Remorse”? Almost never. My life is crammed with stuff, but not because I don’t know how to get rid of things, it’s just that I collect faster than I disperse. Although when the child was about 12, we had a garage sale and (with her blessing) I sold the easel blackboard that she had played with when she was younger. I still sometimes wish I had that back. I could have taken the blackboard part off and hung it up in the breakfast room for notes and reminders. Oh well…..

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    1. I have kept Daughter’s painting easel/chalkboard longer than I should (she hasn’t used it in at least a year) b/c I miss the one I had when I was a kid. It’s taking up room in our back porch, but I just can’t get rid of it yet…hmm…maybe I can re-purpose it…

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  3. My former wife sold her Honda Accord after ten years of admirable service. She and I stood by the curb to watch the skinny kid who’d bought the car drive off in it. His eyes gleamed with joy as he ran his hands over the dash. Then he ceremoniously lit up a cigarette, exhaled a mighty stream and drove off. Kathe was hopping in fury. “He can’t DO that! He can’t SMOKE in my car! No, no, no! He can’t DO that!” You could call it Seller’s Remorse, although I thought of it more as Seller’s Hissy Fit.

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  5. Mornin’ everyone.

    I try not to dwell on it, but it still makes me sad that we sold our house in Inver Grove Heights. Our IGH house was on a beautiful five acre lot backing up to a park on a dead end street.

    We had put $5,000.00 earnest money down on a hobby farm in Frederic, WI. Our intention was to move there once we sold the house in IGH. A couple of weeks after we had accepted an offer on our house, husband decided he didn’t wan’t to move to Frederic after all, so we walked away from the hobby farm and $5,000.00. I was furious that he didn’t decide that before we sold our house in IGH and before putting down the $5,000.00 in earnest money.

    In retrospect, we should have bought the hobby farm anyway, and used it as a weekend retreat. It had a lovely old barn, where I envisioned having barn dances, 40 acres of pasture and woods with a creek running through it. At the time I was too upset to think straight. Damned near got divorced over it.

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  6. My husband regrets trading in his awful pickup when we bought a new van this Spring. The pickup is the one he blew the head on while buying birthday flowers for me (its a long and sad story), and as far as I was concerned it was going to have a spectacular breakdown anytime and we needed to get rid of it. The pickup had some totemic meaning for him that I never quite understood. I admit is it harder to haul branches and trash and transport composted manure from the local stockyards for the garden, but we have friends with pickups who are more than willing to loan us their vehicles in a pinch. I promised him that we would buy a small trailer to haul things with and that has eased his remorse a little.

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    1. My husband was the same way about an old Jeep Cherokee – it was somehow totemic to him. He claimed he needed it to haul things, but most of the time he had it, it seemed like I was borrowing it to haul stuff (this was before we were married). I think he liked being higher up and feeling the bigness of it – and probably some stuff mixed in about what it said about him as a “guy”…but he’d never admit to that.

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  7. Speaking of being uncomfortably close to highly volatile chemical storage tanks and explosive reactions, don’t forget about being at 35,000 feet in the air while this is going on. Just returned from a week trip to Berlin and Venice. Wife got the itch to travel and had some money from her grandmother’s estate. Quite a contrast between those two cities in particular.

    Seller’s remorse? Sure. I collect art…and, while I’m not a dealer, collector’s always buy and sell as pieces become available. And, sure, sometimes you have to give to get. As a collector, if you have some seller’s remorse, you just have to console yourself with the nice pieces you got instead and say to yourself, “1) There’s too much nice stuff out there and 2) you can’t have everything.”

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  8. I wish I could say that I regret selling that Google stock…but that assumes I had Google stock to sell (or Apple stock or Cisco stock or…fill in the blank).

    I have many things that I regret giving away – a favorite sweater (that had grown to small, so really, what was I going to do with it?), some of Daughter’s footie pajamas from when she was an infant (the orange and pink stretch terry stripey ones that made her look like a little Who from Whoville – they went to another kid, but really, how much space would they take if I saved them just to be sentimental?), some pans that I gave to a friend who was moving into a new house and were duplicate sizes to others I had (and now wish I would have given her the set I kept). None of it is stuff I needed to keep, and really no reason to feel regret, but I still miss these things…

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  9. About the only things I sell are books I no longer want or can use, to Half Price or Magers & Quinn, and fortunately if I have remorse about those it’s fairly easy to find another copy (or sometimes the same copy), flip through it and remember why I got rid of it in the first place (regret selling off a DVD? Hello, Netflix!). Like Anna, I have giveaway regrets. Every Halloween I mourn the loss of Mr. Bones. He was a glow-in-the-dark skeleton cutout that we’d had since I was a child. After my mom died I sorted out the holiday decorations, and I thought I’d put Mr. Bones in a keeper bag. Unfortunately, I found out the next year I’d sent the wrong bag to Goodwill, and I was left with the stupid, simper-faced scarecrow instead. I’ve seen contemporary versions of Mr. Bones, but they’re cutesy and not as well constructed as he was, so my search continues. Sayonara, Mr. Bones; I hope you’re still giving little kids the shivers when they see you in a dark livingroom!

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  10. Morning–

    I have sellers remorse; but I think the buyer has more Buyers Remorse than myself.
    We sold an older car to a college student friend of ours. This car had issues and they knew it. Her Dad is a mechanic so figured he could fix it. And we only asked for a couple hundred $$’s for it anyway given it’s situation.
    Said student drove it for a week maybe before that really hot spell in July, then the engine overheated. Dad fixed it, finished it at 2AM and took it for a test drive where upon the he thinks the throtttle body exploded. Or something happen that resulted in a large fireball and the car was now literally toast. We felt terrible but he assured us it wasn’t anything we could have known about.
    OK, they decide to buy my mother-in-laws car. Newer, less miles however same make and model car. Two days after buying it a brake line rusted out. He fixed it, but didn’t get the lines bled correctly – he thinks– as it went backward through the neighbors hedge. Then forward back into the garage and into his tool chest. No serious damage they say…
    They are sticking with this car but he’s not buying anymore of this model.

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  11. I really miss my house in Faribault. It was smaller and easier to maintain than my present home. I sold it so that I could be closer to work – and I am much closer to work now – but I do have seller’s remorse about it. I’m not far away, but Faribault is my home town and I kind of miss being there.

    Great discussions yesterday, everybody.

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  12. This is loser’s regret: My eight-year-old grand-daughter was weaving, humming the chorus from Beethoven’s Ninth or the Joyful hymn, same thing of course. I asked if she knew what it was. I thought she was going to name the hymn. She said, “Beethovens Fifth?” I said no but she should know what the Fifth was like. She said “Bum, bum bum, Bah.”
    I asked then what was she humming. She said “Is it something by Beethoven?” I said I was pleased she knew that. She said everything on classical radio was by Beethoven, and laughed, clearly knowing she was exaggerating.
    Then she got sad and said, “We don’t get that on radio more.”

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  13. Rise at the Crack of Noon and Emit Gloom Baboons:

    I have a weather change headache again. Ouch. I can not think of much seller’s regret, but then I’m not thinking much today, anyway. I’ll just read.

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  15. Sure was bummed when I had to sell my beloved sailboat… part of a relationship break-up. But it did provide clarity to what I thought, at the time, was a terrible situation… I realized I was WAY more upset about losing the boat than the guy. It allowed me to move effortlessly on and into a wonderful life!

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  16. Just got my mail–had two buy back offers.
    One promised me $2400 for my car, a one-year old Scion. Then I looked they named the Caravan I donated a year ago with complete description of what it had. Surprised they did not print the VIN on it.

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  17. With annoying frequency, I have dreams in which I’ve sold my house and I’m moving into a small dreary apartment. The new place usually has some major defects like peeling wallpaper or doorways you have to duck to get through, and I keep wondering why I sold the house and desperately wanting to get it back. It’s always nice to wake up and realize it was only a dream. Not that the house is all that wonderful – but I am pretty fond of it, sagging floors and musty basement and all.

    Can’t think of any buyer’s remorse I’ve had in real life that comes close to matching what I feel in those dreams.

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  18. Great Post! I analyzed this phenomenon in my blog too:

    http://bit.ly/oLfemw

    It’s unreal how the psychology works on this. People hear “We’d like to Buy Back Your Vehicle”, and dealerships end up with more Sales??

    The new trend now is making the pitch to customers on the Service Drive…whether it’s working the phones or hanging up a Buyback tag on the rear-view mirror.

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