Auto Maintenance Weekend & Reflections Dishonesty

Though Fridays or Saturdays are my usual choice for the most convenient blogging days of the week, my weekends are usually pretty busy, and it’s a wonder I get anything written at all.

Quite frankly, I’ve found that most of my weekends over the past few years have been typically filled with at least some of the following acitivites:

Gigs with my band

Birthday Parties

Family Get-togethers

Weddings (ones I'm playing and ones where I'm merely a guest)

Weekend road trips with the wife to visit friends

Church functions

Yard work

Auto Repair/Maintenance

This weekend is a car weekend, and seeing as how nothing's currently broken on either of our daily drivers, I had all the time I needed for much-needed routine maintenance; something I rather enjoy doing as long as parts/supplies don't get too expensive.

Other than changing the oil & oil filter, air filter, fuel filter, and PCV valve in both cars, I diagnosed a harmless-yet-irritating noise in my car, and de-carboned the throttle body and intake manifold in my wife's car (it idles MUCH smoother now).

I thought about performing several other maintenance-related jobs on the wife's car, however I took a look back through the service records the car's previous owner kept and discovered that I had another 10,000 miles before the various other things I was considering needed to be done.



As I thumbed through these service records (comprised exclusively of receipts from a Goodyear Service Center and a Jiffy Lube in Decatur, GA), an ugly pattern began to emerge. $500 here...$400 there...another $500 over here...and for what?

The more I studied the records, the more disgusted I became. It was crystal clear that the lady who owned the car before my wife had been tragically taken advantage of. She owned the car for just over 55,000 miles, and, while there were definitely some minor problems, nothing mechanically serious ever happened. Yet she had paid these two retailers over $3,200 for maintenance and minor repairs. It just made me sick.

Several times, she brought the car in complaining of something (as evidenced by the comments section on each of the invoices), the shop correctly diagnosed it, but promptly went on to "over-diagnosed" it (in my opinion); replacing components that couldn't have been related to the original minor problem.

Some of what I saw was simple ineptitude, however the majority of it was total dishonesty, and I wondered how much the lady's opinion of the car was negatively affected by how much she spent on it. It wasn't that the car was a lemon (it certainly wasn't) - it's that she was getting ripped off on a grand scale, and, as evidenced by the fact she kept taking it back to the same two shops, didn't even seem to notice.

A few minutes on the phone with Auto Zone pricing some of the parts that were replaced validated my opinion that if I had owned the car at the time (doing all of the work myself), the maintenance and repairs would have cost me around 25% of what this poor woman had paid.

I worked my way through college in the auto repair/maintenance business. I endeavored to treat every customer as if she was my own grandmother, and I never had problems sleeping at night because I knew that I was completely honest with everyone I ever served.

But I constantly had to put up with customers walking in my store expecting that I would try to sell them products and services they didn't need.

It's sad to say, but after seeing this, I can't say that I blame them.