How fickle is woman

And just as quickly as I had accumulated a great deal of good will towards those who passed my George, their greedy entitlement attitudes and nickel and diming me (and a ludicrous charge of $40 for new wiperblades!!) send me into a fury.

I just picked up my car - and my charge was $184 rather than the $130 I had been given as an estimate. So I question the charges, where the reveal that they are charging me $40 for the wiper blades and $15 for "shop charges." I was enraged - they didn't even ask me to confirm I wanted the wiper blades installed - had they told me $40 I would have laughed at them and said "no thanks, I'll go to Pep Boys and do it myself. Then they explain to me that the $15 shop charges were to cover their "materials and services" like spraying down my dashboard or some such crap. Now those who have seen my car know it's a total hole - like I am going to be all impressed by a dusted dashboard. I tell them that those should be part of the cost of doing business, and making them visable to the customer is just a way of guarenteeing ill will for the nickel-and-diming treatment.

You know, if they had called me and said - hey, your car passed except for the wiper blades - and for $30 we'll go ahead and install them for you, I would probably have been cool with that (money for convienence) and my goodwill from the inspection would have made me a customer until they pissed me off a couple of times. Now, they have not only flushed any goodwill I had down the toilet, they've left a sour taste in my mouth and neither DH nor I will ever go back.

They say it's 10 times more expensive to get a new customer as it is to keep one... I wonder how much is costs them to lose one - especially when one has a car with 176k on it that's sure to have some mechanical problems that need fixing.

That kind of stupidity should be criminal.

The kicker is that while I was complaining about the charges (which they did knock down in the end, but I was too pissed by then to be mollified) the guy slyly mentions that they "saved" me $700 by passing my car. No, I told them, I had a quote for $350 to replace it the next morning. Plus, if the car was worthy of passing - they didn't "save" me anything. He was just trying to make me feel better about being duped, and it was so transparent it was laughable. Idiot. More service people I'll just have to see in hell.