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Comment by insaneirish | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunate. I sold to them a couple times (5+ years ago) and it was a good experience, overall.

Trade-in values are always quite low, and private party sales carry all sorts of challenges. Vroom gave fair value for the simplification of the process (which was clearly not enough margin to be successful!)

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Sounds like you gave them an unfair value.

They bought the car how is that unfair?

> Sounds like you gave them an unfair value.

Huh?

They were the bidder. There was no haggling or negotiation. Accept it or walk away.

> They were the bidder.

Does it matter? Apparent from the fact that they collapsed, they have been getting unfair value.

The joke is that you consider the price they sold at to be a “fair” value when their values led to them going out of business. Presumably, if you did not have vroom as an option and had to trade in your car, you might claim you received an “unfair” value, even though that value might be helping the businesses stay in business.

I think you're drawing a lot of conclusions out of the word 'fair' that aren't really there to draw from. The commentor above is saying they were happy with the money they were offered. This was a person selling their car, not an accountant doing due diligence on their books.

The point is how useless the word “fair” is when describing prices.

In the case of used car transactions, the “fair” value isn’t affected by either side’s financials. If a company or an individual has lots of free cash flow or a mountain of debt, the fair price isn’t affected.

I don’t think insaneirish was using the word “fair” as in the technical finance term “fair market value”. I interpreted it as “fair” as in a price that they felt like they were not being ripped off.

I consider the fair market value as an input to the “I was treated fairly price”.

https://youtu.be/ag14Ao_xO4c

“We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price.”

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