Here’s the second part of Car and Driver magazine columnist Patrick Bedard’s interview with a longtime gas station owner on Route 66 in Williams, Ariz., and the car-repair scams that his employees foisted on the public for decades.
An excerpt:
My mind leaps to the possibilities. (“Sir, your radiator is leaking real bad!”) It would be so easy for a getter willing to go too far to poke a screwdriver through the fins as he leaned in to pull the dipstick.
“Oh, yes, it happened,” Killinsworth agrees. “I wouldn’t let my boys carry a sticker in their pocket, a sharpened screwdriver. Poke a tire,” he says, “then it would bubble.”
This was back before Goodyear and Firestone had tire stores everywhere, not to mention Walmart, Kmart, and Big O. “We stocked all the good movers, bought up to 500 at a time on 30-60-90, pay a third every 30 days. I could space ’em out so they didn’t all come at once. You can’t sell from an empty shelf,” he says.
“But my boys never used tools,” he says. “You don’t want to poke a tire, then have the guy not buy one; the tire goes flat, and he starts rolling that thing up in the rocks. I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. So we never did that. To my knowledge.”
The whole thing is worth reading. It’s a good thing for Bedard’s source that there’s a statute of limitations.
Part 1 of Bedard’s column is here.