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What I did on Black Friday
Rather than wait in line at Covid testing, or go to the big box store to do shopping, I worked on my car. This is the story of what I did on Black Friday, formerly the busiest shopping day of the year, this year to be passed by Cyber Monday.
6:30 AM: Jack Up Car
The problem at hand was warped break rotors on my 2010 Rouge. I have had to do a lot of work on this little car over the last couple of years as you know. The story of why I am driving the world’s only Rouge is a side story.
The symptom was “rumbling” every time I put my foot on the brakes. It was enough to make me want to fix it. I noticed this problem getting worse after I bought tires last time. I believe it to be partly due to the tire technician getting a little rambunctious with the torque wrench and overtightening the lug nuts, thus pulling either or both rotors out of trueness.
This is the third time I’ve had to do this job for this little car, which has about 140K miles at this point.
8:00 AM: Famous Auto Parts Store
The auto parts store near me offers the service of turning down my rotors. For those unaware of this activity, it consists of machining the surface so that the rotor is smooth, and “true”, which is my experienced guess as to the solution of the problem.
I worked on the brakes on this thing awhile back.
http://www.iso-help.com/2020/01/13/adventures-in-online-auto-parts-part-2/
The young clerk that was opening the place up was struggling to get a big shopping cart full of boxes out the door. He disappeared around the corner and went to the dumpster.
I went in and waited. I was the only one in the store. Presumably the management would have preferred that strangers not be allowed in the store by themselves. The clerk “could” have said “oh, I see that you, a customer, need something in my store. Serving the customers is more important than getting rid of boxes.” What that tells me is that from his point of view, not getting rid of the boxes will give him more grief from his boss.
How that attitude happened probably can be laid at the feet of the manager who trained him.
This was the conversation:
Me (Dropping rotors down on the counter): “I need to have these rotors turned, please.”
Clerk: Sorry, the motor on my rotor turning machine is broke down. I can do it manually but it will take awhile.
Me: (thinking) why is that my problem? (out loud) Oh. Well, I can leave them and come back later.
Clerk: “I can do it manually but they won’t come out perfect.”
Me: (thinking) So you just offered to do a half assed job for a customer. (out loud) Uh… I’d prefer to have them right. I will take them elsewhere.
Clerk: Sorry.
Me: Eh, no problem (gather rotors together and leave).
8:20 AM: Different Auto Parts Store
Me: (Rotors under my arm, pushing the door open.) Do you do rotors anymore?
Clerk: “Nah. We don’t do that. Have you tried O’Reilly?”
Me: “Yes I was just up there. Didn’t you used to do that here?”
Clerk: “Nah. Not here, You want O’Reilly.”
Me: Their machine is down.
Clerk: Have you tried the Service Station up the street? Maybe they can do it.
Me: (thinking) That’ll be the day. (out loud) Not really. Maybe I will try it. (thinking) I want the job to be done cheaply and fast. If I wanted it to be done expensively and slowly I’d take the whole car in to the expensive place at the corner and throw them the keys.”
Me: (gathering parts and leaving) Thanks.
Clerk: Sorry about that.
8:40: Phone Conversation
Person on phone (gruff, tobacco cured voice): O’Reilly.
Me: “I need to have my rotors turned. Do you do rotors?”
Person on phone: “We’re supposed to. But our machine is down. It’s been down since July, and we can’t get parts.”
Me: Okay, thanks.
Person on phone: Sorry about that.
8:50 Second Phone Conversation
Person on Phone (a young female): “Auto Parts.”
Me: Do you turn rotors?
Person on Phone: “Sure, but the person we have that can do it doesn’t come in until noon.
Me: Well, I can come up and drop them off.
Person on Phone: Sure, that would be fine.
Me: Thanks
Person on phone: Thanks
9:20 Third Auto Parts Store (about 9 miles from home.)
Me: I am the rotor guy.
Clerk: Hi, Rotor Guy.
Me: Here are my rotors. I will be in later to pick them up.
Clerk: Before we do that, let’s check to see if I can still turn them. We need to see if they are still in tolerance.
Me: Yes, that is a good idea. I know these rotors have been turned twice already.
Clerk: (pulling rotor calipers out from a box) Let’s see what we have here. What car did this come off of?
Me: (thinking) Do those calipers have a calibration sticker?
Clerk: “Ah, they’re two millimeters under. We can’t turn these. You need to buy new. (consults her system) Yes, we do have these in stock.
Me: Good. You’re on. I hated those rotors. (I turn and pull a ratchet off of the rack behind me). Also you can sell me this tool. I killed my other one earlier.
Clerk: Hey that is a lifetime guarantee. If it ever dies, you can bring it back.
Me: That is good. I am going to live forever and just had something lifetime guarantee die on me.
Clerk: $160. Thanks for shopping.
10:15 In Garage Changing Rotors
The pads are okay. I need to use a clamp to squeeze the cylinder a little so that the mechanism can fit over my new, OE spec rotors.
It takes me about an hour to get it all back together, clean the brake fluid and grease off of my garage floor, and take the car for a test drive.
Unanswered Questions:
- Why didn’t it occur to the first clerk that he should check the rotor tolerance? He could have sold $160 worth of stuff, and made me, the customer, satisfied, and saved me an hour of driving. Leaving aside for the moment the security breach, at the very least he could have done the boxes later.
- Is it really okay for a clerk to offer to do a job crappily for me?
- If a famous chain auto supply store decides to offer to turn rotors, wny do they then lack the commitment to keep them runnning? PS: According to this website:
the cost for one of these pieces of equipment is $6K.
Now, we all know that this company doesn’t make a dime turning rotors.
They do it so that I will come into their store, and hopefully when the clerk tells me that I need new rotors, they’ll sell them to me. While I am in there, I’ll buy a new ratchet, and maybe some oil, and one of those little trees that makes the car smell good, and a Monster as I go out the door.
I also might conceivably buy some oil and a filter, and even if I do not buy those things, I will have a favorable impression of them and want to go back when I need to.
The selling price for a couple of rotors is $130, and the profit margin is probably in the neighborhood of $50 which means that it only takes 120 of me to pay for their machine. At the rate of one or two a week, it means that anything after a year makes them money. This is doubly so if they can upsell me.
The answer to the earlier posed question is: It’s easier to make a commitment on the front end, if you don’t consider maintenance costs. It’s much easier for some marketing team at HQ to say “let’s put a $6K machine in all of our stores.” Nobody says “wait a minute, what happens when they break down?”
More unanswered questions:
4. What does any of this tell you about employee training? The marketing team from this place should be giving each other high five at this point because their “strategy” of offering this service did exactly what it intended. They got me into the store, and they upsold me.
The whole thing was blown up at the first store, because of lack of store management commitment and terrible employee training. I am half ticked off at them, because they couldn’t keep their advertised promises.
5. What does all of this say about the general workforce quality in Black Friday Retail?
6. What was it about the brake rotors on this car that made them warp? Is the engineering department at the famous Japanese auto maker aware of this issue?
Did they also make a business decision at some point as it applies to the engineering of these rotors?
7. What does any of this say about the online option:
Had I thought of it, I could have bought a complete set of all four pads and rotors for this fine car, and had them delivered “free”. Who, if anybody, is making money on that transaction? I know if I tried to ship 40 pounds of brake rotors anywhere it would cost $50 or more.
Yes I know these are likely to be cheap knockoffs, but for this little old car, that might have been fine.
The cheapness of these might conceivably explain why they warp. We won’t get into the un-sustanability of a 12000 mile supply chain, where very low wage workers crank these things out until they, too are replaced by robots.
8. Does the young person at the third store get rewarded for giving good customer service? It is a fact-free supposition, but I’d say the probability is low. This is too bad, because she did something right.
How I spent Black Friday (afternoon version)
Trying to clean the grease out from my fingernails. Forewarning to the people I am auditing this week: I earned these dirty fingernails.
Back in the stone age, it was routine for people to do this kind of work themselves.
I am sure if I’d felt like taking this thing to the auto repair place on the corner, it would have cost me $1000 to fix this $5000 car, because they’d have tried to upsell me.
But now, it is not routine.
Auto repair used to be a skill, by the way, which paid something. This whole industry is changing before our eyes.
“How I spent my Black Friday ” will be vastly different in the future.
There will be a fleet of driverless cars. I’ll make a phone call, stand on my front porch, one of these things will appear, and take me where I want to go. Maybe. The cost for this will be less than car ownership. If I have a car, it’ll be an old Mustang that I work on for nostalgic purposes. Maybe, if I can still find gas, since we’ll all be driving electric cars with batteries with cadmium that is mined by robots.
If I live in some small town in Georgia or Iowa, however, where economies of scale cannot be captured, I may still need to know how to change my brakes.
Therein is the urban/rural cultural divide, laid bare.
Do I need to do another post about terrible retail training? Maybe I do.
Do with this information what you will. Keep in mind my old saying, that people, including me, do what they do until they can’t.
