Haggling Starts to Go the Way of the Tail Fin

Fixed pricing may be coming to a showroom near you as the Web makes prices more transparent and dealers try to cater to women and Gen Y drivers

BusinessWeek, October 29, 2007 — It's one of the enduring oddities of American retailing: car dealers haggling over price with their customers. There's history here, of course. People bargained over horses. And since the proud beasts gave way to the horseless carriage, hardball negotiating between buyer and seller has continued on the car lot. The practice allowed salesmen (and most of them were men) to bamboozle naive buyers with a blizzard of negotiating tactics and generate outsize commissions. But dealers paid a price: The car salesman became one of the least trusted people in town.

Now, some dealers are beginning to dump haggling