I have one that may top them all.
A year and a half ago, in anticipation of my adopted daughter getting a driver's license, I started looking for a used car for her. Not just any car, though. We are a Jeep Cherokee family ... we currently have four of them registered and running, and a couple more Cherokees and Comanches (the PU version) sitting unregistered, back then we had three. But, with the exception of the one my wife drives, they were at the time ALL 5-speeds. I wanted another automatic, because I hate replacing clutches on 4WD vehicles. My friendly (really) not-so-local dealer was the first stop, but the last year for the Cherokee was 2001; the dealership doesn't put ten-year old vehicles on its used car lot. They referred me to a used car dealer farther up-state, Dan's.
So I went to Dan's and looked at a half dozen or so VERY unimpressive and unappealing used Cherokees of varying ages and mileages. Then the sales gal, Suzanne, said, "By the way, we have a brand new 2001 Classic inside, would you be interested in that?" Well, good golly Miss Molly, lead me to it. Sure enough, there it was. 4 miles on the odometer, ALL the window stickers intact, not a speck of road dirt on it. The story was that it had been bought new by a small, rural Jeep dealer in Pennsylvania, who put it away in his barn because he knew it was one of the last that would ever be made. He died, and his widow closed the dealership and liquidated the stock. Dan somehow found out about it, bought it, and had it trucked to his lot. (I later had a friend run a Carfax on it, and the story checked out.)
The asking price was the window sticker. I asked if they would take [a lower price]. Suzanne said she had three people who were thinking about it, so that was the price. I agreed to buy it, I saigned a sales agreement, and I have her a check for $2,000 as down payment. I told her it would take me about a week to gather up the balance due. She said no problem.
In a week, I called and told Suzanne I had the money and would like to arrange a time to pick up my Cherokee. "You can't; we sold it."
I asked how they could sell MY Jeep, for which I had a signed sales contract and had given them a down payment. She said, "That wasn't a contract, because the full sales price wasn't paid. Someone else offered me more, so I sold it to him."
And then she didn't even return my check (which she had not deposited). I'm sure what she did was call the other three on-the-fence buyers, tell them she had a firm offer for the window price, and had them bid it up as high as it would go. All using my sales agreement as the bait. I stopped payment on the check, so I know it was never deposited. When I called back and talked to Dan, he refused to talk to me and said I had to take it up with Suzanne.
So I was cheated out of the last possible opportunity in the world to buy a brand new Jeep Cherokee. I was ripped, but there would have been no point in suing, or even complaining to the department that licenses used car dealers. How could they possibly have made me whole? It's not like anyone could have called up Chrysler/Jeep and ordered a duplicate of the same vehicle. This was the LAST one in the U.S. (and the world) that was still new. Even if I sued and had the sale to the other buyer cancelled, he would have been driving it and it wouldn't have been a new vehicle at that point.
Gotta stop. I think my blood pressure went up twenty points just writing this.
