I feel it appropriate to share my experience with Granger, as they are members of this community. It was unfortunately not a good experience, and I’m sharing this so others may be aware. No dealer is perfect, but there's a lot that I feel should have been done better.
Process and Experience
My vehicle was cleared for release four business days after delivery, and after an unnecessarily lengthy three-day signing process. The feeling of being just a number came across as soon as I had a delivery date, with a standard “don’t call us, we’ll call you email”… but also comes across in the way people treated me, who were unashamedly slow and indifferent (especially finance). It felt like I was always bothering people, especially after the Jeep arrived. The messaging was clearly, “we have other customers ahead of you, and you’ll have to wait in queue”, and “we do 400 cars a month, we’re very busy”. Nobody wants to feel like a number, and most customers are not sympathetic to a car dealer that’s too busy to keep on top of their responsibility to the customer.
Responses were mostly aloof on the phone, or short one-liners, often times questions I ask are ignored. Simple things, like asking to confirm they took delivery, or if it got there without damage, were surprisingly difficult answers to attain (I never got a straight answer on the latter, and now I know why). I wanted to send an AirTag before the vehicle arrived, to drop into the car for transport. The staff I spoke with continued to ignore my question about who to send it to there, even after asking three times over the course of a few weeks. Jeep UConnect doesn’t ping inside a covered trailer (or maybe while the vehicle is off?) so I have no way to track it right now.
The dealership is very hell-bent against the few bad apples flipping their vehicles that they put you through all kinds of unnecessary process to ensure that you won’t flip it. Granger insists on registering the title in your name and in Iowa, rather than provide the MCO. If you are financing, they ought to be sending the title application to your own state so you don’t have to title it twice. Policies also insist on collecting your state’s excise tax, but Granger doesn’t know how other states work; so the burden is on the customer to find out who the check needs to be made out to and the address it needs to go to. This is specifically called out as an anti-flipping policy. Well, in my state, it is much quicker to walk in with everything you need and register yourself than to go through the mail service, which can take 60+ days. Given that I will only be provided a 15 day transit tag, chances are these anti-flipping policies will leave me with an un-drivable vehicle for a while.
Just hearing from finance took a couple days. I was initially told it would take 5-7 days just to be contacted by finance, and then another 3-5 days to complete the process. By being the squeaky wheel, I was able to get the finance process started after only 2 business days after delivery, and finished in 3 more. This is still ridiculous though compared to any other dealer. This backlog is standard for Granger, and no up front communication was provided about what to expect. If a car dealer is this busy then they should scale up their business. The average dealer takes less than 30 minutes to complete a sale. I walked into this with everything they needed all ready to go, including an approval letter for financing through one of their preferred partners, and it still took days. I had asked days in advance for a date we could be wrapped up, so I could use it as a pickup date for transport, and they refused to provide any estimate - setting me back a few more days (it takes 2-3 days to get a transport scheduled from the sticks)
Many aspects of the finance process could have been done before the vehicle arrived, when close to the delivery date. Even if a credit app isn’t run, getting one filled out and getting the paperwork, identification, and affiliate information ready and verified would have made the first couple days of the financing process easier. Much time was wasted due to their poor internal processes. When I suggested the process could be improved, I was told, “well it works fine for us”.
Finance
Eric (their finance manager) is quite acrimonious and treated me like I was bothering him by existing. One time, he explicitly said “there’s more than just you”, while trying to get a one-word response from him via email. These are signs of a poorly trained employee, and a pretty miserable human being in my opinion. His sole job is to push paperwork around, yet this process took several days - and he’s getting mad at me for pinging him about something by email. Sorry, I shouldn’t have to act like your babysitter. Do your job.
My affiliate rewards information was lost and had never gotten processed. This should have been verified upon, or even before, the vehicles arrival; the expiration dates on these last a year. There is no excuse it couldn’t have been done within 30 days of delivery. He did up all the paperwork, and I even sent the wire transfer before I realized he hadn’t priced it in. We had to re-do a bunch of it. Emails I’d sent with my license and insurance info were also lost, wasting more time to resend them. They should have already been in the file when finance opened it. The wire info should have been available on their website or to anyone who asks for it prior to delivery, it sometimes takes a few days to set up a remote account due to verification etc., even before you send a wire. This is not secret information. Fortunately, my bank was easy to set up. But I asked for this days ahead of finance, and nobody would send it to me. It could easily hold things up for a day or two depending on bank.
Finance’s policy is to force the customer to wet sign the odometer statement before releasing the vehicle - this is just plain idiotic. It delays the process an additional 2-3 days, and holding the vehicle is not required by law. Further, it turned out this magical form that they had to mail out was something they printed, and not a state-printed certificate… so they could have just emailed it to me, and I could’ve printed it and sent it back signed on the first day. Instead, they saved this stupid dance until the end of the finance process, holding customers up for days. It’s already in the best interest of the customer to sign and return the form as soon as possible. It’s in any decent contract that the customer is bound to furnish all necessary signatures. Forcing the customer to wait until you have the original document in hand is pointless, and achieves nothing. I was able to convince one of the GM’s to release the car instead of waiting for this, and they finally did - but Eric’s first response was, “that’s not his call”. This is just total incompetence.
Finally, once all the paperwork was done, Eric was unwilling to check bank for wire transfer himself, knowing full well it would delay my scheduling of a transport back another day, solely because they get wire alerts in the mornings. It would have taken a few minutes to check their account the day it was sent. He’s that indifferent to his customers.
Conclusion
I feel like a lot of the delays and frustration were a result of Eric, who I thought behaved like a jerk through the process, but a lot of this falls on Granger too and all of the policies. My Granger experience really wasn’t worth the trouble in the end. Granger doesn’t corner the market on discounts, and there are several other dealers who will provide the same discounts on orders but not treat you like a number or a criminal, and who have a more efficient process and policies in place.
It’s also worth noting that Granger, Iowa is in the middle of nowhere (near Des Moines), and finding a transport was difficult; it ended up taking two days just to find a carrier who’d take the contract. These delays, too, could have been avoided by Granger being more organized and being committed to finishing up the process within a day or two - I could have then scheduled the pickup at the beginning of the process, rather the end. The whole “it’ll be done when it’s done” attitude of finance made it impossible to tell just how long this was going to take.
Granger really could have knocked it out of the park as the online dealer they aspire to be. Unfortunately, my experience was that of delays, poor communications, undisclosed damage, and having to deal with people who really seem to view us customers as a burden. I don’t think we’ll be using Granger in the future. It’s just too much drama, and while I appreciate the discounts, I don’t think it’s worth being treated like I don’t matter. There are a number of other members in our community who offer these discounts - Dan Cummings, Mark Dodge, Chapman’s, and so on. I suspect at least some of them have better process in place to avoid such a bad experience.
Lastly, I thought their final email to me telling me “if you cannot submit with all 10s, please do not fill out Chrysler’s survey” was quite tacky. I will definitely be submitting a survey, and forwarding that email onto the Stellantis executive team.
. Yes, please update us. I am invested bc I am deciding on a dealer.
