Scam-me Lube stories

Maintenance/Repairs
21

I have a long list of reasons I will NEVER do any business with those pee boys, In town or out of town, but I could get quite long-winded unless youall want to know.
And as a professional parts man needing to buy parts from additional sources I can put a good size dollar and reputation dent on them localy.

When they burned me professionaly 6 times, I cut off all purchasing from them.( I have other options )
But when they burned me PERSONALLY ( as joe q. customer ) both local and out of town…I WILL TELL EVERY SOUL WHO’LL LISTEN to spread the bad news.

22

Are the stories entertaining or just long? I like a good story.

23

You can tell when you request 15w-40 and they put in 5w-30. On the (older V8) engine in the car in question, I could feel and hear the difference in the engine as well.

24

Professionally, a list of little things like; telling us on the phone they have the item, then they have no delivery, then the item is wrong and they don’t have one. ( time and again this happens wasting everyone’s time. ); Saying they don’t have one, Telling customer ‘no-go’, cust say’s they spoke to X who said they do, call back to X and sure enough…More wasted time and can’t trust any phone call to them ever again so I cut them off.( Ford dealer potential for $12,000.00 + yr )
-NAIL IN COFFIN-
But when when it gets personal…grrr, watch out >:(

Pesonal incident 1.
We drive to Albuqerque to visit ( 140 m one way ). Daughter drives from her college town to meet us there ( 220 m one way ) on this fine sunday afternoon. “Dad, my cars hissin’ and peeing on the ground. Looks like anti freeze, it didn’t overheat.”
“Let’s go look” brings a crew of kids to help ( daughter can change her own spare, plugs, oil etc. Younger son , nephew, and neighbor kids just wanna help ) “this should be easy, it’s probably just a hose leak. I have some tools in my truck.”
. Pop the hood , see which hose, and down the street we go to the first parts place we see…peeboys.
me) “87 Taurus 3.0, need the big heater hose, top of water pump to heater hose manifold, 1”- two slight bends- 3/4".
pb) "don’t have one"
me) "could I see your selection of hoses to see if there’s something I can use ?"
pb) "NO, no customers behind the counter."
me) "Then why don’t you go look by my description ? Anything I can cut down will do."
pb) "we don’t have one"
me) ( hand him my business card )"Im a ford dealer parts man, can’t you take me with you to go look? "
pb) “NO.”
-NAIL IN COFFIN-

Drive two more blocks to Auto Zone.
az) "sorry we don’t have one in stock."
me) "could we look at others to see if any will do?"
az)"Sure, a longer hose might cost more but follow me."
me) :slight_smile: Found hose that fixes the car within the hour.

Personal incident 2.
On the way to a saturday night band job, 60 m one way, 7:00 pm now, dance at 9. 14 miles out the band gear trailer blows a tire, KABAM takes off the fender too. It’s spare is flat do to age and uv exposure ( lesson learned ), and my Explorer spare rim won’t fit on the trailer hub.
We put the flat spare and the blown tire/rim in the truck and head back to town likety-split knowing what time it is and wondering who’s open at this time of night…pb is the only one who does tires. ( my Ford dealer is locked up tight by now.)
me) "WE need a tire mounted asap. Wrong size, don’t balance it, anything."
pb) "Can’t get to ya till monday."
me) ( Hand em my business card ) “I can work the machine if I could do it myself.” ( I knew their next answer, no customers in the shop. )
pb) “nope, can’t do it till monday.”

Ran to drummer’s house and got his pickup, went to trailer and off-loaded the equipment in the Explorer and the pickup and made the band job an hour late but played extra at the end. ( Luckily trailer was not vandalized over the weekend sitting on the side of I40, and tire was replaced by my guys on monday.)

-FINAL NAIL IN THE PB COFFIN-

25

Tires Plus (Minus) Franchise store on East Lake Street in south Minneapolis.

I went to the Tires Plus (Minus) Franchise store on East Lake Street in south Minneapolis, Minnesota to get a flat tire repaired on my new 03 Chevy Astro.
I took the flat tire off and put on the spare because it had a screw in the tread and was flattened to the rim. The Tires Plus (Minus) store is 5 blocks from my home, I had bought a set of expensive BF-Goodrich Radial T/A s there for my previous van. I parked in a stall their lot in front of the building and carried the flat tire in. They repaired the Bridgestone tire, I paid for it, and the manager offered to put it back on the vehicle at no extra charge. I went and got the van and parked it in front of a closed overhead door. The technician came out and took off the spare and replaced it with the repaired tire (he left my spare tire leaning against the overhead door). He got into my van and I watched him drive it out into the city street a few feet and into the alley next to the building and tried to park it in the little lot at the side of the building. I was watching the whole time because I didn?t know why he was driving it somewhere. It didn?t fit in the parking stall between the Black Jeep Cherokee and the end of the little lot so he side swiped the left rear side of the Cherokee a long the wheel well with the right front corner of my brand new Astro van. He hit the Cherokee hard enough that I saw it move. I was standing inside the store watching through the window about 60 feet away. So he drove it back out into the street and parked it in the street along the curb on the side of the building. Then he brought key into the store, walked past me, dropped the key on the desk without saying anything, and went back into the shop, and then left for the day. I was a little stunned. I went and described what I saw to the Manager. I went and got the van off the street and parked it in front of the same door (I also had to retrieve my spare tire he left leaning against the overhead door). The Manager walked over to the Black Jeep Cherokee with me to look at the damage to determine where the black paint that rubbed off on my van came from. We walked back to my van and he went and got a rag to clean off the black paint and see how much damage there was. The Manager determined that red paint was scraped off my fender and gold paint was scraped off my vinyl bumper. My Astro van was new, just 4 months old and less than 2,000 miles. The manager told me to go get an estimate for the damage. (Removing lights, Painting the fender, Removing the bumper and Painting it, and rental car for 5 days came to a total of $1,200.) A few days later I took the estimate to the store and left it for the Manager. The manager called me and said he was sorry, but the employee told the Tires Plus (Minus) store Owner that he denied damaging my new van or the Black Jeep Cherokee, and the Owner believed him and so would not pay to fix the damage to my van. (The manager told me the owner liked this employee and so wanted to believe him weather he did it or not, and I also found out that the owner of the Black Jeep Cherokee was never told that their vehicle was damaged while it was being serviced there.) At the time it happened, I didn?t write down the license plate number of the Cherokee so I was not able to contact the owner. I called the Minneapolis Police department but they refused to get involved. I called the Tires Plus (Minus) Corporate Headquarters and was told that this particular store on East Lake Street in south Minneapolis is a Franchise Store and not owned by Tires Plus (Minus) Corporation, so they have no authority over the owner and cannot make him do anything. END OF STORY.

26

It doesn’t sound like they were trying to scam you. It just sounds like they were following company procedure regarding customers behind the parts desk. Annoying yes, but there was no intent to steal your money.

27

Writing format makes your post too hard to read.

28

True, there are some horrendous stories here. Maybe they’ve done me a hidden favor by treating my like dirt…keeping me out of any of their stores forever.

29

Gee–I said the same thing and my post was removed.
The moderators always liked you better, I guess!
(With apologies to The Smothers Brothers)

30

Keep in mind that it is likely the moderators didn’t delete your post. It was probably flagged by users of the forum. Personally, I don’t find it that hard to read. I am just glad it is broken up into sentences.

If you have a hard time moving from one line to the next, try highlighting the text with your mouse as you read.

31

John 1x6
I do not want to seem like a buthole but you need to look in the mirror.
Right when it happened you should have jumped up and down and hollered at manager and ask if anyone else seen it.Do not let worker go until matter is settled.
Have a policy nobody drives you van unless going in or out of garage.
Why was cops not called right away, maybe they would not help but it would not hurt.
Always get all info tag numbers,names and time it happened.
Ask everyone you see, hve a camera or phone with one.
Say you are a 20yr old and they ask you if you wrecked van, looking at loosing your job and maybe have to pay for repairs %75 would lie!
All I am saying consumers have a responsability to protect them selfs and when they get screwed over they LET themselfs get screwed over.

Hope I did not make anyone mad, that is not my intent.

32

“If you have a hard time moving from one line to the next, try highlighting the text with your mouse as you read.”

Whitey–I respect your opinions, and I frequently agree with them, but in this case, why should I–or anyone else–have to work that hard in order to read someone’s post?

If someone wants free advice, I think that it behooves that person to make it as easy as possible for others to read their question (or their mini-essay). I’m sorry, but I don’t think that I am going to start highlighting anyone’s text, line by line, in order to be able to read it. I think that people who post questions or comments in this forum are getting more than their money’s worth, considering that the service is free.

All that I–and some others–ask is that they make their posts conducive to reading, and this one was not conducive to reading.

33

At the aforementioned “National Dealer of Tires and Batteries,” only this time in Cleveland… I ordered a set of aftermarket wheels for my Jeep some three years ago. Against their recommendation I had them mount my existing tires on the new rims (the tires were in great shape and only had 20k miles on them). Somewhere in the process the Jeep developed a vibration at speed. After several rounds of re-balancing with no success, they agreed to send the wheels back for a replacement set. The replacement set showed no improvement, so naturally the old tires were to blame. I asked them to guarantee that if I purchased new tires (at the “great discount” they offered), the vibration would go away. It didn’t. They told me to start replacing U-joints. I drove home and started inspecting the drivetrain, and found that the front driveshaft was visibly bent, complete with damage marks with clean (not yet rusted) metal. Turns out, they’d used a four point lift, and missed the frame rail and picked up the Jeep by the driveshaft instead. Their regional office reimbursed me for a replacement driveshaft (installed elsewhere).

I always perform my own oil changes and other routine maintenance, with one exception when I was away at college. I had an oil change done at a national chain, and $45.00 later, nothing was done wrong. However, it took a week to clean up the oil and grease they’d splattered all over the front end of the car, including on top of the hood and the outer face of the front wheels. (guess they took “chassis lube” a little too literally…)

As was mentioned, probably 90% of the time these shops do fine. My track record is 0/2, so, I assume the worst. I’ve since developed a great relationship with a local independent mechanic who has yet to let me down.

34

While not really a scam story as much as a lack-of-intelligence story, this one makes for good reading. I worked in a repair shop for a few years which was a mile or so down the road from a ‘wally world supercenter’ with a tire and oil change shop. They provided us with an engine replacement job about every year or so (that’s just us, not counting any other shops that ended up with jobs from them) and I can’t count the number of Saturns and Mitsubishis I saw that left that place with leaky transmission filters (the spin-on type. They thought it was the oil filter, said ‘oops’ then reinstalled it too loosely). There were also rumors of Hondas leaving that place with no transmission fluid after someone drained the transmission and added four quarts of oil to the old stuff remaining in the engine.

35

I don’t have a story to tell, but I have to say that I feel screwed every time I leave any repair shop.

36

It is probably because you are thinking “that didn’t look so hard I could have done that myself”.

37

Fair enough. I thought I would offer a tip that helps me read long paragraphs even when the posts are properly formatted.

38 
 So I used to go to two different "Iffy" Lube places.  One in Coralville, OK...
 Once, I went during high school -- I had lunch then an open hour so I had over an hour free.  They took like almost two hours just to change oil!

 Another time, they left the oil cap off -- I caught it.  They suggested I should check my radiator for air after a flush'n'fill -- I popped it open before I left and it was like 2/3rds full.  Some cars have a lot of little passages where air can get trapped, but this was a 1972 Fleetwood which, well, doesn't.

 The OTHER one, in Iowa City, was great.  Fast, did every thing right every time.. my sister complained once because they laughed at the decrepitude of her Plymouth Horizon (in fairness, it WAS comically noisy and run down though).  They renamed themselves after a while, dropped the foo-Lube franchise.
39

My soon to be brother in law is not mechanically inclined in the least. He is also gullible and speaks with a stutter, so you have a perfect recipe for these places to try to take advantage of him. He went to a ‘club of sam walton’ tire and lube center for a tire rotation. He had just bought the tires six months ago from their sister operation, ‘wally world TLE.’ They told him the tires were “chopped on all four belts” and needed to be replaced immediately for safety’s sake, and that his alignment was “so far off it had ruined the tires and voided the warranty”. This was a couple of years ago when he was a college student and dating my sister rather than engaged to her. She had the good sense to drag him and his car out of that place before they sold him $400 worth of tires he didn’t need. They also refused to rotate the tires due to “safety reasons,” so I rotated them in my driveway for him, and naturally saw nothing wrong with them. No slipped or broken belts, no feathering, and no alignment wear. That’s why I say these tire and lube centers are in the business to sell tires, whether anyone really needs them or not.

40

The only reason I ever visited a fast lube joint is because of the now defunct OK state safety (word used loosely) inspection law after I managed to rid myself of this responsibility as an inspector.

The safety “inspection” never took more than 20 seconds. One guy at the rear, one guy with the paperwork at the front, turn on the lights and wipers, honk the horn, and you’re done. What a joke.
They always suggested an oil change or filters, which was always declined.

While I understand P Boys may have a policy I think it’s kind of lousy customer relations that they couldn’t try to match up a lousy hose for ken green. Several times AutoZone or O’Reillys has invited me on back to eyeball something during a pinch.

And slightly off topic here ken green, but you mention band and drummer. What do you play; bass, lead or rhythm guitar, keyboards? Just wonderin’.