A quite enjoyable and interesting piece by TAL. One aspect that I found interesting is that Manny, the guy inspired by Sun Tzu and without much inherent interest in the cars themselves, actually fared poorly in sales [1].<p>This sort of salesman is exactly the sort of person I always want to avoid when I am looking at purchasing something, so I am glad to see his techniques were not all that effective.<p>Overall, the piece doesn't paint the dealership model in a very positive light. While it makes one sympathetic to some of the individual salesmen (at least, to some extent), it also largely reinforces many peoples' assumptions that, mostly, they are prey when they arrive at a dealership, unless they know what they are doing (or, if they happen to arrive at the end of the month during a poor sales month and happen to be slightly stubborn).<p>A related note: I'd love to see more car sales go the way of Tesla and Saturn [2] (yes, Saturn), where pricing is much more transparent/fixed. Basically, I find the current dealership model's incentives to be largely mismatched to the actual needs of consumers.<p>[1] (~10 cars per month) <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/at-the-car-lot/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thisamericanlife.org/at-the-car-lot/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/saturn-a-wealth-of-lessons-from-failure/" rel="nofollow">http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/saturn-a-wealth-o...</a>