Pretty-bad, I find that usually the older guys still working will give you a bit of credibility if you just know what you're talking-about. Sometimes it feels good to just walk-away.
My wife was on her way to an important appointment first-thing today, and there she was at home w/a flat tire. I removed it and took it to a Sears tire shop for an inside-patch. After waiting in an empty shop for the service writer to finish the paperwork from the only other person who had been there, he finally got-around to asking me why I was there.
"I need a car tire flat patched, the wheel is off the car in my truck," I told him.
"OK, we can do that, come back in two hours, and it will be ready," he replied.
That's a job that should take ten minutes! I asked him about why the long wait.
"We do everything by appointment, there are three cars ahead of you," he told me.
I politely declined to wait for my tire patch and went to a Goodyear Gemini shop where the store manager cheerfully pulled my tire out of my pickup bed, gave it to a service tech, and in ten minutes, the wheel was back in my bed. He wouldn't even charge me! I got change for a twenty and handed the service tech who did the patch a tenner.
Years-ago, I went to a Sears auto store for a new pair of shocks for my van. About two weeks later, I was driving down US-1 in Miami FL and heard 'pling-pling-plingplingplingpling' coming from under my truck. I pulled-over and found a three inch stack of flat fender washers was about a third-missing on one of the shock mounts which also went to a steering member. I guess they had to cut-off the shock bolt, and when they replaced it, they didn't have the correct length, so they just threw in a much-longer one, and took-up the difference in length w/the stacked fender washers as a multi-segmented 'spacer.' Of-course with use, the stack loosened-up, the nut fell-off the bolt, and the washers were raining-down underneath my truck onto the road, South Dixie Hwy. in Miami. Man, I was so-pissed! I took it back and got it repaired for free, of-course. Maybe if they had just run a couple of weld beads across the stacked washers' edges, to make it a single rigid spacer, the repair might have survived. They never even told me about the mickey-mouse repair! If they had said, "we don't have the correct size bolt/nut for length in-stock, we did this so you can drive it home, but if you can bring it back tomorrow or as-soon as-possible, we'll replace what we have in-there w/the correct length bolt," but they didn't. Stupid, dangerous people.
