I know this isn’t new, but I thought I’d share it as a public service. The investigative reporter got ripped off by five out of nine Jilly Lube locations who charged him for work they never performed.
Again???
20/20 did a segment on JL years ago… and it wasn’t pretty.
I don’t expect there’ll be any changes unless criminal prosecutions ensue involving JL’s senior people. I seem to recall that the last time JL’s management said they were sending their involved “technicians” to additional training. I suspect that “training” was all of five minutes long.
And still people continue to do business with them and others like them. Why is that do you suppose? Greedy, lazy, really don’t care?
Actually, according to this video, the training JL conducted in response to the first report was to teach employees how to spot investigative reporters in the hope that they wouldn’t get caught again.
I suspect they either don’t know or don’t care enough about car maintenance to inconvenience themselves by going elsewhere.
That is a sad story, corporate greed? Trickle down economics? Rip them off or you will loose your job? I believe in people want to do a good job unless directed otherwise.
LOL, I can’t believe I missed that one! How altruistic of me!
I think a very tiny percentage of the population actually listens… and due to the great many “Chicken Little” “investigative reports” in the major media, fewer of them believe these TV investigations. Oddly, they’re probably more likely to believe it if they read it on the internet from a totally unknown source!
Actually I think first, car care is not their primary concern. Secondly they can get their oil changed CHEAP so consumer greed has something to do with it. Thirdly, they can just go in whenever they want and not have to plan at all-just like a fast food place and then complain about how small the meat is.
About 25 years ago, the Attorney General in two states sued Sears for fraudulent repairs in two different states and won the suits. One would think Jiffy Lube executives would have figured out that this practice doesn’t pay, but apparently they aren’t that smart.
Or it actually does pay…
I had the same thought. If it didn’t pay, they wouldn’t do it.
When I was a kid, fireworks were illegal, but one store always had a supply to sell to kids or anyone else. Every year they would be in the paper for being fined for selling illegal fireworks. They paid their $50 fine every year and did the same thing the next year. Made a lot of money. They were the only fireworks store in town. Let’s see in business school it was: Gross$, minus expenses, minus fines, = profit.
When I was a teenager the county I lived in was dry . There was a bootlegger in the area that sold liquor . Ever so often he would get arrested , pay a fine & there would be a write up in the local newspapers about it . He called it advertising he was paying for . Everyone knew who to go to , to buy a bottle .
Ah, the business model of drug cartels clearly defined…
In any industry, if the benefits of evading the law far outweigh the penalties of getting caught, there’ll be those that will willingly evade the law.
It’s kind of ironic that our least regulated industries all seem to be those that operate outside the law. Depending on your point of view, this can be used either to support deregulation or as evidence that we need regulation and enforcement to keep businesses in check. You can probably guess which side of the issue I’m on.
This is why unregulated capitalism doesn’t work. When Ford decided they’d rather kill people with their Pinto design flaw than fix the design flaw, and that got out to the public, logic would dictate that Ford would never sell another car. That obviously didn’t happen.
Same with the GM ignition scandal.
And it’s not just cars either. 3M got caught dumping toxic PFCs into the groundwater in Cottage Grove, MN. They poised the water supply of 125,000 people. Yet people still buy Scotch Tape.
And that last example is really telling, because if I lived within the 100 square mile radius around the 3M plant, I would be getting poisoned by a company, but people who live thousands of miles away are still buying their products, giving them profit, and therefore the poisoning won’t stop unless the government gets involved.
In this specific video, a lot of people would have missed that news story and not known about it. More would see that Jiffy Lube fired a bunch of people and assume things would be fine going forward. Even more would assume that these bad things happen to other people and they’ll be fine.
And still more would think to themselves “I’m willing to risk being cheated if it means an enhanced convenience factor,” which is the same line of thinking that has put our private data about literally everything we do on the internet into the hands of untold numbers of corporations. “Sure, I’ll click “agree” to this dialog box because it means I can play on Facebook with my friends, even though it means that Facebook will now know everything about everything I do online and will do anything with it that they deem profitable whether I want them to or not.”
The average consumer is not a rational animal.
Not much has changed in 60 years though. In the early 50s my family’s daily driver was a Buick and an American Oil company service station filled the gas tank and serviced it as needed but when the car burned a valve and was taken to the dealership for a repair my dad was informed that the oil filter had never been changed since leaving the factory and there had been quite a few oil and filter changes paid for since then.
You pretty much summed it up. I would only add that they may be attracted to the Jiffy name. Everyone seems to be in a hurry now days.
The public seems drawn to brightly painted and lighted businesses on busy streets with fast food joints and strip malls. If a shop is in an upscale location with a nice young lady to greet you and write up the work order it must be a good business, right…
I have been thinking about a Jiffy Lube shop. With the hybrids and battery cars, I would offer the service of removing the contaminated volts in the field coil windings and replacing these contaminated volts with fresh volts. This is particularly important for owners who live in areas where hydroelectric power is used. The volts generated could have moisture in then which is certainly bad for electric motor coils.
I am also thinking about marketing a voltage filter for cars with electric motors.