I took my car in to their Alpharetta location for an oil change, and to check out my brakes. They were shaking pretty noticeably when stopping from about 55mph upwards. So we left the car there because we're people with jobs and it's not too far from work. I'd had my oil changed there previously, as well as a flat tire fixed for free. They seemed okay.
Little did I know. They called me up at 1 o'clock and told me that I needed a full front brake job - rotors, pads, shoes, the whole nine yards. This was going to cost me upwards of $600.00. Do I really need new rotors? Well, yes, yours are too thin to resurface. Like anyone else, my first thought was that a car with bad brakes is pretty unsafe. Sure, do my brakes.
I hung up the phone and thought about it some more, and then I called my dad. As I'd suspected, the last time we did my brakes wasn't that long ago, and when we did, we put new rotors on because he'd closed the store by then and we didn't have a brake lathe at the house for him to resurface my old rotors. The ones on my car had never been resurfaced at all. Too thin to resurface my a*. I called them and cancelled the service.
Next day, I tried to use my windshield wipers, and there was no windshield wiper fluid. Little things, people, little things. I was already suspicious, but not filling my fluids really made me angry. Now I'm not even sure I got an oil change.
Fast forward to last night: We took the car to see my dad. He removed the wheels and we looked at the brake pads there was zero, zilch, nothing, wrong with my brake pads. I needed new pads like I need a frontal labotomy. The rotors? A little warped from the wheels being torqued on too hard, but beyond that, not beyond saving them through a simple resurfacing job. We didn't fix the rotors last night, but we did torque the wheels back on with the appropriate 80 pounds of torque. It's possible the rotors will even back out as long as the wheels are torqued back on properly, but we may resurface the rotors anyway. We'll see in a couple of weeks.
I called up there this morning to give them a piece of my mind. They actually wanted me to let them look at the car again. I advised them that unless I was there to babysit the moron who put the wheels back on my car, I wasn't letting anyone take them back off. Furthermore, I was never again going to darken the door of that establishment, nor was my husband or anyone else I knew.
My dad spent his entire life in this business, and never cheated anyone. He didn't get rich fixing cars; he just made a living. It's people like this lazy mechanics with no morals whatsoever that make it so very difficult for honest people to work in the business. How can I make this right, he asked.
You can't. You shouldn't have tried to steal $600.00 from me in the first place.
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