Walmart Supercenter

Ok… it’s Walmart… a place to save a few dollars while mingling with a wildly diverse population of humans and semi-​humans. The parking lot is a mess and always trashy, but the store is clean enough, usually. They have a pretty good selection of fruits and vegetables and those are usually in good condition. Many of the prices in the grocery section actually rival those in the DAFB commissary. I don’t shop here often, but when I do, I like to use the self checkout line.

I’ve driven big 4WD trucks with big aggressively treaded knobby on/​off-​road tires for half my life. My current 4WD truck is my NINTH 4WD. I bought my current tires at this location, the biggest ones they sell, which means I get them rotated and balanced for free there, which means I kinda feel obligated to go there to have it done, or else I’m going elsewhere to pay for what I could have had for free.
So I went in this afternoon and dropped my truck off to have the tires rotated and balanced and asked them to go ahead and change the oil while it was there. Signed the paperwork, went over to Applebee’s for a bite to eat, came back about an hour and a half later and picked it up. The auto department manager rang me up and checked me out. He didn’t mention anything unusual, just recommended that I get an alignment soon, so I signed the paperwork without wading through all the fine print and took off. Got about halfway through the parking lot, and remembered this was Walmart, after all, and pulled over and got out and looked it over.
Well, what do you know? The front tires are still on the front and the back tires are still on the back. Whaaaaat? I turned around and went back.
When I got back, the manager who’d rung me up had gone to lunch, and the clerk who was there said the paperwork said they couldn’t rotate them due to uneven wear, so I asked to speak to the store manager. I ended up with an assistant store manager. I explained the situation. I asked him if he’d ever driven a 4WD truck with big tires, and if he was familiar with the fact that no matter how well they’re balanced and aligned, they NEVER wear evenly. They’re loud, they wear unevenly, that’s the price you pay for having that type of tires. He explained that the people in the auto service area aren’t actually mechanics, they just do «visual inspections», install and rotate tires, and change oil, and he quoted me the store policy, which is that they don’t rotate unevenly worn tires. Then he told me he could have me sign a waiver, and they could rotate my tires for me.
So then I waited another 40 minutes while they did the actual work that I brought my truck in for in the first place.
My big beef is that they didn’t even bother to tell me that the work hadn’t been done. If I didn’t have a good familiarity with mechanical and maintenance work, I might never have even realized it. Burying it in the fine print of a receipt and then not mentioning it is pretty lame. And then to find out that they could have just had me sign the waiver from the very beginning and I’d have never had to waste all the extra time!!!
I’ll still go back for my free rotate and balance service for the life of these tires, but I’ll be sure to question everything, and I won’t be buying any more tires from them.