Welcome to Great Things Tampa Bay, the podcast about great eats, great places and great people in the greater Tampa Bay area. I’m your host, Kyle Sasser, a Tampa Bay native and realtor. This is Episode 14 “Deflate Things Tampa Bay.” I’d like to thank you for giving us your time. I know there’s lots of things vying for your attention, and I appreciate you choosing to spend your time listening to me and this podcast. I promise I will do everything I can to bring you something awesome. I also want to let you know that we now have express feeds. If you’re only interested in our food reviews, just do a search for “Great Bites Tampa Bay.” If you want more of our interviews with interesting movers and shakers in the area, just look for the feed “Great People Tampa Bay,” and for things to do in the area shops or other events, just do a search for “Great Places Tampa Bay.” These feeds are listed on our website greatthingstb.com under the heading Express Feeds up at the top there.

So this episode, we are going to come at things from a little bit different angle. Obviously, we’ve had 13 episodes so far, and we’ve featured a great thing on every episode. But, you know, I wouldn’t be truthful if I said that everything about Tampa Bay was great. You know, a lot of times it’s just as important to know where not to go as where to go. A lot of times certain types of businesses, you know, if you have a bad experience then, you know, it can be real bad. So anyway, I thought in this episode we would cover one of those. This is from my personal experience, and just so you know, I don’t do this if I just have one bad experience. You know, I don’t think it’s worthwhile to judge a place based on one interaction with it because, you know, sometimes people have bad days or, you know, certain circumstances can align to make things bad. Let’s just take, for example, if you’ve not had a lot of rain and then, you know, you want to go take a canoe down the Alafia River, you can’t get too mad because there’s not enough rain to run the river. So, it’s all about circumstances and all that.

But, my personal belief is that if you have a few interactions with a park or a place and each one just leaves you thinking, “Man, this place is horrible,” then, you know, it’s probably a good thing to let other people know so that they can avoid it and they don’t have to waste their time. So with that in mind, in those caveats, so my wife and I, Abbie, we went to, you know, we were just curious driving around looking at Jeeps, specifically Jeep Wranglers. So we went to Dayton Andrew Jeep on 34th Street North. That’s U.S. 19 and like 23rd. We’ve been there a few times. This story is our most recent experience there, but the other two times that we have been there it was a very, very similar experience, so, and we were looking at two different vehicles each time. The first time we were looking at a Jeep Grand Cherokee and this last time we were looking for Jeep Wranglers. Specifically, you know, used Jeep Wranglers, manual transmission.

So we pull into the Dayton Andrew Jeep dealership, you know, they have a little…I can only call it a guard tower. It basically looks, you know, like they’re trying to patrol a prison there or something. I’m assuming it’s so they can see, you know, the buyers, you know, walking the lots and they can coordinate and all this stuff. When we pulled up there, there was no one on top of the tower and there was a guy sitting underneath the tower. Basically, you know, covered in sweat, very disheveled, sweat-soaked shirt. Honestly, I thought it was one of the guys that wash the cars that was just kind of taking a break. But then he, you know, popped up a little bit and said, “Hey, how can I help you?” Then confirmed that he was a used-car salesman. We then asked, we were like, “Hey, you know, we’re looking for a Jeep Wrangler, manual transmission.” He’s like, “Well, Jeep Wranglers are over there. Stick your head in to see if they’re manual transmission or not.”

Now, those of you that might not be familiar with Jeep Wranglers, they’re near and dear to many people’s hearts. They’re kind of like, what’s similar, so like motorcycles. They have, like, similar culture, like Jeep owners will wave at each other on the road. Almost like the, you know, the reverence of like say the BMW 3 Series or the Porsche. So, it’s not unusual to ask for a manual Jeep Wrangler. Now, they don’t make so many of them but, you know, it is something that people actually look for pretty regularly, and I would think that they would know what on the lot is manual and what isn’t. It’s not like they have 5,000 of them, they had about maybe six, five or six. So anyway, the salesman just kind of pointed in the general direction of the Wranglers. So we went and looked, opened the doors. The cars themselves were in pretty bad shape, like, the carpets were filthy, just, you know, looked maybe they hadn’t been vacuumed at all. The outsides were actually fine, but the interiors were, let’s just say, not the most care given to it. And I come to find out after we looked on our own, that they did not actually have a manual Jeep Wrangler.

Now, we then went over and looked at the new cars, thinking that maybe they would have a manual over there because honestly, I hadn’t really been in a Wrangler since, I don’t know, high school, which was 1990, I’m not going to tell you. Yeah, but just to say that it has been quite a while since I’ve been inside of one. You know, I was just curious of what they look like nowadays and how they drove and all that good stuff. So we go over to the new car side of the lot there, thinking that, you know, maybe they would be a little bit more knowledgeable and be able to point us in the right direction. They did have a row of about 25 Jeep Wranglers there. We then went to the new sales guy and basically the same thing, it’s like, “Hey just, you know, walking around, checking out stuff and we’re looking for a manual Wrangler. Do you have any?” And he said, “They’re all locked, but stick your head through the window, you know, look through the window and you can see if they’re manual or not.” So we walked down the 25, 30 cars there. None of them were manual. And as we were doing this, he didn’t even, like, help us look into the windows. He basically just walked, kind of, like, down the fronts, and basically just, kind of, through real salesy questions at us.

We got to one Jeep Wrangler that was this lime green. Nothing against lime green or, you know, those neon colors, but they weren’t exactly what we were looking for. But yeah, he just kept pounding on us. He was like, “Hey, you know, it’s a really great deal on this. You’re never going to find the cheaper one, blah, bah, blah, blah, blah,” and we just kept repeating like, “Listen, we don’t like the color. We’re not interested in the color.” He was just like, “Well, you could probably just paint it for like 300 bucks. A few hundred bucks you can get a new paint job on it.” Which is absolutely ridiculous. Like, I’m not going to buy a new car, you know, just to put a new paint job on it, just because some schlub tells me that it’s the best deal ever.

So that was our experience looking for the Jeep Wrangler. As I said, whenever we were looking for the Grand Cherokee a couple of years ago, it was pretty much the same experience. It’s one of those things where you get in the car and you drive away just like, “Man, I never ever want to go back there. I don’t want anyone to ever go there.” So this was my personal experience, and I would love for them to listen to this or, you know, to kind of take stock of their customer service and turn things around. But basically, as it stands, I cannot recommend them in the least. If you are interested in purchasing a Jeep I would recommend driving up to Fitzgerald’s Countryside Chrysler Jeep, which is up 19. It’s north of Clearwater and all of that stuff, so it’s a little out of the way for most people in Tampa Bay, but it’s absolutely worth it. The staff there is very knowledgeable. They’re all fans and Jeep advocates and enthusiasts themselves. If you head up there ask for Steve Flescher. He was very nice, showed us a couple Jeeps, was very knowledgeable, answered all of our questions. All around, just a good standup guy.

So our two thumbs down to Dayton Andrew Jeep on 34th street, just, I can’t recommend them. Anyway, if you have any comments or other horror stories on places you like to absolutely avoid at all costs, just drop us a message. You can find us on Facebook, or you can just send me an email Kyle@greatthingstb.com.

So I want to thank you for sharing Great Things Tampa Bay with your friends and family. You can share us by going to our website, greatthingstb.com. There you’ll find share buttons on nearly every page. You can share us on Twitter, Facebook, all that good stuff. If you’re looking for your own great place in Tampa Bay, I’m also a licensed realtor specializing in deep knowledge of Hillsborough and Pinellas County. So if you want to talk real estate, you can give me a call at 727-300-2111 or you can send me an email at kyle@sassergroup.com, that’s, K-Y-L-E, S-A-S-S-E-R-G-R-O-U-P, dot com, and I would be more than happy to help you find your next home here in Tampa Bay. I also need your feedback. I need you to tell me where we should be going, what we should be eating, and who we should be talking to, so please go to our website, greatthingstb.com, and you can hit either the Contact Us link at the top or, the Get Social link also at the top. If you want to be a cool guy or a cool girl, you can call our voicemail number which is 727-440-4455 and leave us a message. I’d love to hear from you.

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