A short walk from our offices in Santa Monica is a dealership that sells cars liberally festooned with an assortment of aftermarket equipment (see accompanying photograph). Here, the dealer has taken the $32,125 sticker price for a top-of-the-line import wagon and inflated this price by $2,675 by adding various items. When we looked at the list, which includes a wood package for $695, CD changer for $795, custom matz (sic) for $295, window tint for $395 and paint protect (sic) for $495, only the CD changer seemed to have real value. And even that comes at a high price.

We called a local glass shop and found that it would cost about $145 to tint the back windows of a station wagon. We then phoned a detail shop and told them we wanted a reapplication of the paint protection that the dealer put on our car when we bought it new. "You're talking about wax, basically," they told us. "That's all they do is wax your car." We expressed shock that someone could charge $495 for a wax job. "A lady was in here last week asking about the same thing," our detailer told us. "It's pretty sad that they do that."