Brian's Blog

I’m not sure what you will find here; general musings and maybe some technical stuff spattered here and there.

Thursday, July 27, 2006


I Hate Walmart

I hate Walmart. I hate the people that shop there. I hate the people that work there. I hate the people that slowly walk down the center of the parking lot lanes totally oblivious the the traffic pile-up behind them.... I could go on and on but that's not really my point.

Even with my obvious dislike of Walmart, I still buy stuff there. You really have no choice; they have the lowest prices, especially when it comes to tires. When shopping for the best deal on tires, you will always end up at Walmart. This brings me to my point. Walmart tire service sucks butt.

Now I realize Walmart isn't an oasis of mechanical genius, but for the price I was willing to take a chance. I ordered my tires on-line and had them shipped to my local Walmart. I got the phone call when they came in, and promptly ventured out to "my" Walmart to get them installed.

I didn't stick around to watch the tires get installed. I was at Walmart, I may as well spend $100. God knows, no matter what, you always exit that place minus a c-note at least. So after I had everything checked off the shopping list I dropped back to check the status of my car.

I saw that my car was still on the rack. As I got closer I noticed they had put "ford focus sized tires" on my Explorer. As I was banging on the window to get their attention, they were lowering my car. My Explorer now had a mere 4" of ground clearance.

I started talking to the tech that put the matchbox tires on my car. He said those tires were a valid alternative for my Explorer, and they were the ones I ordered. After arguing he dug through the trash to find the shipping label that came with the tires. Sure enough, they belonged to some other poor schmuck.

After 30 minutes they finally found my tires and in another 45 minutes they installed them. I didn't notice they installed three of them backwards until I got home. I guess its unusual for light truck tires to have a directional tread, so they weren't used to looking for the huge bold text that said "MOUNT THIS SIDE OUT" on the tire's sidewall. They closed for the night, so I had to stop in the next morning to get that fixed.

After two trips to Walmart and a combined total of 3:45 of waiting I finally have new tires, and I've learned a valuable yet glaringly obvious lesson. If you decide to purchase tires from Walmart realize one thing: The techs that will be installing them are as dumb as the tires you are about to have installed improperly.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home