Last week I bought a new car. The dealer I purchased from offered a $200 “free gas” card as part of their counter to another dealer’s offer. It was obvious at the time the cards cost them less than face value hence their preference to use them in lieu of a cash discount, but I foolishly treated them as equivalent to their face cash value for the purposes of negotiation. Once I got home and researched the cards a bit, it became clear they are one of the many bits of sales trickery in the car salesman’s arsenal.

You can visit the FreeGasCentral website and see for yourself, but here are some notes:

The way the card works is thus: you activate the card and choose the brand of gasoline you’ll be buying (Exxon, Chevron, Wal-Mart, etc). You then save your receipts every time you buy gas from the specified brand (and ONLY that brand).