I guarantee that the only person that will recognize you when you walk in the door is the specific salesperson you worked with—and they likely won't recognize you beyond, "I think I've seen that person before—maybe I sold a car to them."

Making the customer feel that they took the dealer to the cleaners is a time-honored sales technique. They still made money off of you, and will be happy to treat you just like any other customer.

A car dealership is like a casino. The house always wins.

So are you saying they are refusing to give you service or provide you with a shuttle they're providing other customers with simply because you talked them down to a price they still agreed to?

Service and Sales are completely different departments. They rarely speak. They rarely interact. They report through different managers, sometimes up to the VP level for large dealer groups. I've known a handful of car salesmen (half dozen or so) and quite frankly can't believe a story like yours would ever happen at any dealership large enough to have both an in-house service center as well as free shuttle service.

Agreed that OP's post is somewhat nonsensical. How can one "absolutely destroy" a dealer who still makes the deal? Making deals is their business--that's the one thing they have to be competent at on the sell side. Maybe they want some troublesome customers to feel like the customer "won" but there is next to zero chance an average customer pulls the wool over their eyes or successfully strongarms a dealer. You'd have to set up some kind of situation like the one where Donald Trump stiffed a music store owner.

  dealership that I absolutely destroyed

This almost certainly didn't happen. If they made the sale, they were ok with the net over everything. If you saw any crying it was crocodile tears.

To these places you are a "type". They probably clocked you in moments as "guy who like to think he's playing hardball and winning" and walked you through that set of conversational gambits. At the end they end up with a profit in their acceptable range, you end up feeling you came out ahead. "win-win"

Sometimes they think they will get you in finance or in addons and if you don't let them, then yes it's possible to destroy them in relation to a normal transaction. They often get paid on incentives or other structures too so they could be getting destroyed on a single sale. Last car I bought I negotiated the price and then the finance guy came over and hadn't yet understood that I already had financing ready at a super low rate. So they thought they would get me there but I refused to let them even try to run my credit.

It's certainly possible they made no money on the sale itself for a variety of reasons.

They love getting you on financing, but will never count on it if it’s not already on the offer.

You might have got them down to net zero on this on - I have no idea. But the vast majority of people who think they did, didn’t. Just part of the game.

There are pretty reliable ways to get a good/better deal , but they still make a bit of money. And you’ll usually compromise something too.

I don’t understand, you don’t have to interact with the sales team in order to get warranty services.

I understand where you are coming from, and I've heard similar sentiments from other people. Having said that, I have never personally experienced this with a dealer. There just isn't that much interaction between the sales and service department at most dealers, beyond what is required for the sale itself.

There may be exceptions, but I haven't seen them.