My father in law had his K-car towed to Pep Boys to have a starter put in. I was going to give him a ride to pick it up. I called them several times at 2 hour intervals to see of it was ready. they kept saying they were working on it. Finally they called and said they couldn’t fix it, they had put 3 new starters in it and it just kept bucking and jumping and making a terrible racket.
I asked them if they had checked for a cracked flywheel and they said they had on idea how to do it.
I took a chain and we towed it to a nearby Chrysler dealer and the replaced the flywheel and started the next day for not much more than what Pep Boys were going to charge him for the starter.
Like I’ve said before, and I’m not big on new regulations, but to me it would be helpful to know the ultimate owners of some of these brands. When you have 20-30 brands all owned by the same conglomerate or 5 tool brands all owned by the same holding company, seems to me the public should easily have this information along with the brand logo. Don’t you want to know who owns the Craftsman brand now in addition to what country they are made in?
I know who owns Craftsman. Stanley Black and Decker bought the brand from Sears. They already made some of the tools for Craftsman. Maybe now they make all or most of the tools.
Do a web search for the company and you should find a trace to the owners. I did that with Pep Boys and found Icahn Enterprises is the owner. I clicked on Icahn Enterprises and the URL showed that, as suspected, Carl Icahn is the CEO.
Yeah I know who owns them too but just saying that it should be readily available on their packaging like “Proctor and Gamble”. You shouldn’t need to do a Google to find out. But that would probably discount their brand.
Consumer protection laws need more teeth. Fining Pepboys 80 grand for defrauding people is like giving a Mafia capo a speeding ticket. It doesn’t faze them.
Make it 80 million and maybe they (and other companies) will learn not to do such things in the future.
I have one of those stop stickers on my car. It doesn’t have a K&N filter, but the sticker tends to stop them from taking the airbox off to try and sell me a filter.
