After dropping my wife off at Costco, I headed to the storage facility to get a cooler to carry food in for our drive to Nashville, TN tomorrow.
On the way, I thought that it would be good to get the alignment done on the truck so I stopped at the National Tire & Battery on the way to the storage facility. They said it would be $99 for a one year warranty and would take about 45 minutes. “That’s great!”
I walked to Subway so that I could eat fresh while they worked.
Halfway through the sandwich, my cell phone rang.
“Well, we found out why your truck can’t be aligned…(I wasn’t aware that it COULDN’T be aligned)
and these vehicles are notorious for this…(I rolled my eyes because I could hear it coming)…but the upper and lower ball joints are out on the driver’s side and the passenger side. Now, normally that would be nine ninety nine but I have cut it down to nine twenty five.”
“Do you mean nine hundred and twenty five DOLLARS?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t do anything. I’m coming to get the truck.”
That has got to be the oldest con in the mechanic’s book. The old ‘bad ball joint’ scam.
Do I KNOW that they are lying…not yet…but I ain’t spendin’ 900 bucks on a truck with 160K miles on it without a second opinion!
Perhaps it is just coincidence, but this exact ‘scam’ enabled me to find our mechanic in LA. When I asked for a second opinion, the guy who became my mechanic told me that the ball joints were fine, and fixed the problem very inexpensively. He got my business for the next 19 years.
