I previously had a poor experience at Firestone but thought it might be location specific. Unfortunately, my experience this time around appears worse than the price gouging or false advertising I experienced four years ago. My brother dropped off my car on Monday (9/16/24) at 11am with the hope of getting a flat tire patched. Around 4pm, after asking for updates multiple times, we received a call stating that the technician could not patch the tire. We asked for the cost of installing four tires that were listed as being in stock on their website ($68.99/each), but the person told us that their in-house brand cheapest tire was the only one available (stock count was off for this tire as well).
We were under the impression that a technician took the object out of the leaking tire while attempting to patch it, meaning we would be required to purchase a tire to drive it home, so we did. Two days later, I noticed that the same tire was flat and realized that the tire on the opposite side had been replaced instead. This means Firestone replaced a perfectly good 110k mile tire with one of their own that has extremely poor reviews while never even attempting to patch the tire in question. I have been trying to contact someone to resolve this issue; the store “couldn’t find the invoice”, the help chat kept disconnecting me with no resolution and the email address that is listed in response to all these poor reviews would not accept my message.
Those automatic responses don’t mean much when nothing gets done or the burden is put on a customer to follow up with rectifying fraudulent business practices. Maybe I could justify this as being an honest mistake had there been an easy solution or any sort of reasonable customer service. Waiting over 5 hours for a service to NOT be performed is a little more difficult. I have worked with Les Schwab, Costco, Discount Tires, Pep Boys, and many other shops who offer tire patching services. I have even gone to Walmart of all places and received better service…
I could complain about other services that were performed during this visit/appointment, but those mistakes are more reasonable and forgivable. Supposedly there was only one technician available, which I can empathize with, but I would have happily rescheduled to help accommodate for this rather than waiting five hours for work to not be performed. I work in the automotive industry so I know how things can go with parts or when short staffed, but there is zero-tolerance when it comes to fraudulent misrepresentations or outright theft of a customer’s parts.
I am tempted to get this tire repaired by one of their competitors just to further accentuate this point. I’ll wait and see how their response to this review goes first though. Hopefully there isn’t some lame “here is how to contact us” type of response….
