Rant.... Wannabe mustang mechanics

Mustang5L5 said:

How much do AZ employees typically make?

I was thinking of a part-time job, maybe 2 nights a week or one weekend day in addition to my normal 40 hour week career.

Then again i might get in a fight with someone.

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Around the St Louis area its only about $8 an hour. My supervisor only made $9.50, I make that much sleeping in the warehouse I work at now.
Getting in a fight is a possiblity, I heard that a customer threw a rachet socket at an employee at a different store than where I worked.

Well time to go to work.

Shawn, you types funny

At least the Stang is more fun now!

Mustang5L5 said:

"Yo, i have a 2003 Ford Mustang GT with the V6 high-output turbo engine, give me some Bosch +4's for mad tite HP"

Oh yes...the first time i hear that i would go off

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Its funny you say that. I work at a transmission shop and last week a few Persian guys brought in a 99+ v6 mustang because it needed an axle. Apparently one of them was driving drunk and slid the car into a curb. Well anyway the car had cobra R wheels and he brought his own axle for it and takes off before I start working on it. So when I go to put the axle on the car, I get it out of the box and come to find its an 03 cobra rear axle. They all come back and argue that the guy at the parts store says its the right axle, but they keep calling the car a "cobra" because it has cobra wheels. I said "no **** he says this is the right axle, you keep calling the car a cobra when its just a regular ass v6 mustang".

I hate customers, they all know more than the dude fixing their cars.

do autozone employees get discounts on parts?

I was thinking about working at the autozone at manchester and 141 this summer because im always there buying random crap. I know its a stupid place, but im always there buying a fuel filter or oil or seafoam or a headlight bulb or something.

I worked a Big A Autoparts in college, my favorite were the guys that wanted spark plugs for a small block Chevy. When you asked them what year or model, they always said "doesn't matter, it's small block Chevy". I would give them plugs for a 1955 265 CID samll block. They always came back and were a lot more willing to give info.

Then there was the guy that wanted to get a can of starter fluid and 5 feet of vacuum hose. He was going to run the hose into his air cleaner and squirt the starter fluid into the hose while he was driving to act like nitrous. He was driving a Chevette.

Or the guy that wanted a blower/heater fan so he could turbo his car.

So it's not just the employees that are stupid.

do autozone/napa/carquest/carstar/oreilleys employees get discounts on parts?

LiquidGT said:

How were you making 500 a week? My 19yr old manager didnt even make that much.

I used to work there a few years back and it sucked. I never pretended to know everything about every car. Our store motto was if you dont know you dont know, dont go around giving wrong advice, we had a good crew at one point believe it or not. Now the store is full of dumbasses like the rest of them. I used let the customer pick the part, if they got the wrong one it was their fault or the computers fault.

Another favorite question was '2wd or 4wd' , Well I'm getting a headlight.

Gripes as an AZ employee:

What Kind of car is it Ma'am?, "I dont know, its blue." (The car was always blue!)

Saturn owners dont ever know what kind of Saturn they drive, if they do break out the fckin confetti and baloons! Hallelujah!

I loved when customers sat a battery on the counter and only said, 'I have a battery.' , What about it?

The chevy guys were the worst, they'd bust though the door and say 'CHEVY TRUCK!' What kind of truck (you hillbilly)? Is it a Tahoe, Silverado, Avalanche, S10, Blazer, Suburban, is it a 1500, 2500... 2WD, dually, engine? What year is this CHEVY TRUCK?

And they used to do the same thing with the 350, 'CHEVY 350!' So...is it a LT1, a 70's 350, do you want an exhaust manifold for a Tahoe or a Vette? Whats it in!

I dont have much against Chevys, its the people who drive them.

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So true, man, so very sadly true...

I had once typed up a list (I think I still have it somewhere) of the "10 Commandments of Retail Auto Parts Sales," and you hit on a couple of those same points above as I did. I'll have to dig around and see if I can find it so I can post it up on here.

In the 5 or so years I worked retail auto parts, I've got literally hundreds of stories of people whose displays of idiocy are simply staggering. I've had price tags, a water pump, and alternator, a fuel pump, and a bearing thrown at me (not all by the same person, of course). I've been called just about every damned name in the book, and then some, because some butthole doesn't have a receipt, doesn't know what name, phone number, or even what ZIP code their warranty is under, and/or the part they have never even came from our store (guys trying to return Wal-Mart or Interstate batteries to Autozone for warranty swaps). I've seen guys get severely burned when they decided to change the radiator cap on their hot car right in the parking lot. I've had countless dudes try to start physical fights with me for the dumbest things, from warranty issues, to people who get pissed that they don't know what car/motor they have, to one jackhole that couldn't understand why we wouldn't/couldn't physically replace the alternator on his vehicle (it's an auto PARTS place, buddy, not an auto REPAIR place). So help me, I will NEVER again work another retail auto parts job in my life because even though I love cars, I FRIGGIN' HATE PEOPLE!

What a LOT of people fail to realize about Autozone, Checker, Advance, etc. is that these companies DO NOT hire actual "specialists," in the sense that they actually have a clue what in the hell they're talking about 90% of the time. They're button-pushing monkeys, plain and simple. These people are not hired for their extensive knowledge of the ins and outs of automobiles, how to do repairs, what parts work best, what vehicles came with what in what years, etc. ... they're hired to look up numbers on a computer, fetch those parts from the back, and run a cash register - THAT'S IT. So, OF COURSE they don't know a lugnut from a spindle nut.

What sucks is that these companies mislead their customers by giving these clueless 'tards name tags that say things like "Parts Specialist" or "Auto Parts Tech" or whatever ... things that IMPLY that these brainless Joe-Schmoe-off-the-street dorks actually KNOW what they're doing. I have always said that the general public is a mass of stupid, arrogant, self-important buttholes, and that certainly holds true when you're working in retail auto parts; on the other hand, it's sadly also true that a lot of the people they hire into these places are just as bad as (if not worse than) the average idiot customer.

People seem to especially rag on Autozone as having employees that are absolute retards 99% of the time, but it's just as true at any other retail auto parts place ... including dealerships, and the almighty NAPA. (Yes, sorry to burst some folks' bubble, but even NAPA has some arrogant I-think-I-know-it-all buttholes working for them.)

The big issue is that these people just aren't trained properly/adequately enough to do their jobs effectively in the first place, and so a lot of them try to muddle their way through the day by copping an "I know everything about everything" attitude, or the stupid assumption of "If it's not in the computer, it doesn't exist" or "The computer/book listings are NEVER wrong." This isn't necessarily the fault of the company as a whole, but rather on the lower-level side of store managers that do the hiring and training of their employees ... although the upper-level part of the company fails to heed customer complaints and issues with regard to this that I'm sure stream in on a daily basis, thus they allow the problem to continue unchecked.

The issue of pay is irrelevant because it doesn't matter if these chuckleheads are paid $7.50 or $17.50, an idiot is always going to be an idiot. They tend to pay on the low side for most of these places, anyhow, because their hiring process is so loose and sloppy, the criteria for hiring so lax, that they wind up with a lot of complete losers that wind up getting fired over idiocy (poor service, no-call/no-shows, stealing, etc.) and they've got a horrible turnover rate. There's no point in paying a lot of these clowns a lot, because they don't deserve it, anyhow. What also sucks is that the ones that DO know what they're doing, and DO have a good work ethic, are NEVER recognized for their performance in any way, and so they (like I did) get burned out, get sick of being taken for granted and walked all over and abused by the general public and their idiot DM's and store managers, and they don't stick around - they go off to do other jobs in other fields.

Remember, it works both ways. Just because you know a thing or two about cars doesn't mean the doofus on the opposite side of the counter does, too (regardless which side of the counter you're standing behind). Whenever you're dealing with ANY people in ANY retail auto parts situation, you're dealing with a potential idiot, so don't act terribly surprised when they prove themselves to be as such.

5.0Torx said:

do autozone/napa/carquest/carstar/oreilleys employees get discounts on parts?

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I heard oreileys gets a wholesale discount. AZ has 20% discount, but it doesnt work on special order, most fluids, sparkplugs, and freon. I did score a lot of free stuff from 'damaged returns' $80 floor jack, silverstars, cone filter, rc car... ect. Anyone want ventvisors for a S10 I dont own one. I could have had a WIDE selction of hubcaps, people would buy them and break them in the parking lot and return them.

I seen the same people go from Orielleys (the worst) to AZ. AZ employees go to Advance auto, then to Napa.

Everytime I go to Orielleys they try to give you Seafoam. Busted head gasket "TRY SOME SEAFOAM. Leaky valve stems, Seafoam! Scrached paint, Seafoam.

Darkwriter77 said:

So true, man, so very sadly true.......................................................

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MikeC
I worked a Big A Autoparts in college, my favorite were the guys that wanted spark plugs for a small block Chevy..... .

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Yeah those old Chevy guys were pricks, they didnt say 'HI' or anything. It was just Chevy, Chevy, Chevy. They were like Pokemon, they could only say one word.

-One time I had a oldddddddd man come in he must have been like 95 yrs old, could have croaked behind the wheel at any moment. He drove a nice silver Towncar with a big yellow wooden plank bolted to the front bumper. Anyway he came in and asked me for electrical outlets for a home!

-I had a woman get irate because she wanted me to fix her a/c.

-"Do you all do paint jobs?"

-"Do you sell tires?" NO!

-This is AutoZone not BOATzone. I dont know anything about boats!

-"Do you install the brakes." Sure let me get my egg crate to sit on, and my half missing set of Chinese tools, why dont you get your little emergency jack out...

-Every douche bag would come in when it was raining and wanted us to install wipers. A fine time to realize you need wipers.

-One headlight car rolling up they need a headlight. Before they came into the store we'd have the bulb waiting for them. We had a game to guess the bulb number by the type of car it was, I was 90% accurate.

-We had a old man come in one time howling about water pump grease? Have YOU ever heard of water pump grease? I know of chassis grease and ect. He didnt want to give any info whatsoever, none of the others didnt know what the hell he was talking about, neither did the customers behind him. I told him to go to the grease section, he comes back because he couldnt find it. Finally after 10-20 min the manager found a tube of grease sutible for water pumps, it was written in fine print.

Darkwriter77 said:

I've been called just about every damned name in the book, and then some, because some butthole doesn't have a receipt, doesn't know what name, phone number, or even what ZIP code their warranty is under,

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I worked at Checker before BigA, I had a guy come in with a bad starter, every other word out of his mount was F##k. "F##k this, F##kin that, this F'n starter, what are you F'n gonna do? I'm F'n pisses. Your F'n crap you F'n sell here" I asked him for his receipt. He said "I don't F'n have it". I said "well, your F##ked then." He left kinda pissed. The manager was standing next to me and never said a word to me about what I said.
I have to admit, I kinda miss this kind of stuff and I haven't sold car parts for over 13 years.

Y'know one thing that REALLY always burned my arse when I worked for any parts store? Warranty info. (Sorry, this kinda applies to the original poster.)

NOBODY keeps their friggin' receipts, it seems. I guess I grew up in a totally different time, country, world, dimension, or whatever. As far back as I remember, the case was always, "No receipt, no return." Ever since Sam Walton and his evil empire came along and screwed over the way retail businesses are run, suddenly NOBODY feels they are responsible for keeping their receipts for ANYTHING. Is it really so hard a thing to do? Take a standard mail envelope and tuck all your receipts in there, and chuck it into a file cabinet or something at home (NOT in your glovebox, because heat kills the ink/paper). Is that REALLY too much to ask? Apparently so.

Soooooo, some auto parts company execs got together and said, "Hey, we can get around this problem if we just take their info down and log all their warranty purchases in one big database." Cool idea in concept, because (in theory) you can not only look up warranties in customers' histories at that store by name, phone number, ZIP code, etc. but also you can check to see if OTHER stores have their stuff on file. Neat, huh? Here's where the system fails, due to general human stupidity/laziness:

1. Again, NOBODY keeps their receipts. Thus, nobody remembers what damned store it was where they bought their part(s).
2. Cell phones. I FRIGGIN' HATE CELL PHONES. Why? Because so many of these technophile douchebags that just GOTTA have the latest and greatest phone will change their phone number TEN TIMES in 2 years, so they can NEVER remember what phone number they had their warranty listed under.
3. "Well, it's my relative's car, and they had some shadetree mechanic guy put it on, and he bought the part with his commercial account, etc." so nobody has a damned clue who even bought the part, thus there's no way to know WHO to look for the part under.
4. Paranoid conspiracy theorists. I can understand not wanting to have personal-personal info listed in there like a Social Security Number or anything, but good lawd ... all these people ask for is a NAME, a PHONE NUMBER, and a ZIP CODE. They don't even need a freakin' address, just those three basic, relatively anonymous identifiers. And I had SOOOOOO many jackholes throw a total hissy about it ... and then throw ANOTHER hissy fit later on when they can't remember what fake name/number they insisted on having the parts dude enter into the system, so they can't retrieve their warranty info.
5. Idiot employees. Yes, this is a factor, but only about 1/5 of the time. (If it weren't for the above 4 items, this wouldn't even be an issue, anyway). As with the OP's case, I've had stupid employees enter my warranty info under totally unrelated vehicles. I ALWAYS have my receipts, I know what number/name my stuff is under, but when they go a step further and try to look under what vehicle it's listed with, I find all sorts of totally random BS ... Mustang parts listed under Chryslers, Hondas, and so forth. If I have two legit cars that I own listed in their system, they'll put parts from one under the other, and sometimes (like when I had a 'Stang and a Town Car) the parts interchange between the two, so it's tough to tell which one was for which car.
6. System file deletion. Again, I ALWAYS keep my receipts (because I know what a PITA not having them on hand can be when you're on the other end of the counter), but what REALLY chaps my arse is every once in awhile, some yahoo in their network randomly deletes entire vehicle history info out for no good reason. I'll have a receipt in hand and all, and even the dude working there is familiar enough with me that he remembers me buying the part, but suddenly the crap just isn't there in the system, period. I've even had some places try to refuse an exchange/return even when I had a receipt in hand, trying to say I already refunded the part previously and that's why my stuff's gone. (At which point I have to become one of "those" customers that pitches a fit and demands upper-management, but that's only because they're the only ones that can technically override the system and force a transaction.)
7. Warranties are NOT TRANSFERRABLE. Simple concept. If YOU didn't pay for the part, YOU don't get the warranty. Works the same way with dealerships and any other kind of warranty elsewhere, so why expect different with car parts?

I know, I know. This is America. Nobody is reponsible for their own actions. Everything is everyone else's fault. And, by this idiotic rhetoric, people expect auto parts companies to be fully responsible for keeping track of everyone's frickin' receipts. Sorry, but it's logistically IMPOSSIBLE for a company to keep track of everyone's warranty info FOR THEM. This is why they give you a receipt when you buy things - so YOU have that information in hand, and it is YOUR responsibility to keep track of YOUR warranty info. Again, put your receipts in an envelope and keep them somewhere that they won't get discarded or destroyed. Simple, easy, doesn't cost a thing (hell, you could use an old junk mail envelop, even), and saves EVERYONE a lot of hassle.

If this is too much to ask, then by all means, stop buying your own parts and let a shop do all of your repairs (and charge you labor AND a marked-up price on the parts), because they MUST keep all of their purchase history on-hand for their commercial accounts.

MikeC said:

He said "I don't F'n have it". I said "well, your F##ked then."

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i've wanted to say that sooooooo many times!!!

i work at tractor supply company. Lots of times you auto parts guys send customers to us. some of the time we dont have what they're looking for and i say "check the auto parts stores..." they get pissed...they were just there...well i guess you're SOL buddy.

Teh Zone uses that thermal paper that fades away in 9 months or so. Sometimes we would tell people to copy it.

Mustang5L5 said:

How much do AZ employees typically make?

I was thinking of a part-time job, maybe 2 nights a week or one weekend day in addition to my normal 40 hour week career.

Then again i might get in a fight with someone.

"Yo, i have a 2003 Ford Mustang GT with the V6 high-output turbo engine, give me some Bosch +4's for mad tite HP"

Oh yes...the first time i hear that i would go off

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i started at 8.75 an hour.. seeing as new jersey's min. wage is 7.15 and at the time i was only 17, i was making out like a ****ing bandit.

and to the guy who asked how i was making so much money....

8.75 x 52 hours a week (i worked 6 days a week in the summer)... and then with overtime...

well, let's see..i don't remember EXACTLY how many house a week i was working.. i think the most i ever hit was 57.. but we'll take it from a straight 50 hour scale...

8.75x 40 = 350

8.75x.50= 13.13 (time and a half for overtime.

13.13x10 (for ten hours of over time) = 131

350+131 = 481. and because i filed for tax exemption we'll say that they took out 30 a pay check (and that's probably being generous, from what i remember)...

so we'll say my average weekly profit was generally around 450... multiply that by two and you get a 900 dollar pay check. times two that's 1800 a month. i did that for the entire summer and a bit of september. i was ROLLING in the ****ing money.

However, i had to drop that **** when school started back up, so i picked up an easy job working at a local YMCA making minimum wage and eating animal crackers all day. for the holidays i was also working at the mall on a 7 day a week work schedule... i was making about 700 a month, which is still ok for a 17 year old. but now that i'm down to one job i'm only making like, 450 a month (which means almost no dough for the mustang :'()... but i got a job working security at English Town for the spring, with those hours i'm hoping to boost that up to 900 or so a month again - that'd be ****ing SWEET.

5.0Droptop said:

I dont keep reciepts cause Teh Zone tracks it all in the puter and says its in here you dont need the reciept.

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The info in the system is only useful if...

1. You remember what phone #, name, and/or ZIP code you had the stuff under;
2. You remember what store and at least AROUND what date you purchased it;
3. The stuff got entered correctly in the first place;
4. They even took down your information (if they don't make you a pre-sales ticket at the parts counter and just send you over to the register, half the info doesn't get entered);
5. The system info didn't get purged for some reason (I still don't know why this happens, it's occurred at EVERY parts place I've been to).

That being said ... BE A RESPONSIBLE CONSUMER AND LEARN TO KEEP YOUR FRIGGIN' RECEIPTS!

We used to have scam artist come in all the time, the ones that rattle off random phone numbers just to see what kind of parts are under warrenty. Then they'd come back with that part and return it for cash. We had one guy that would go around to different AutoZones and return assloads of parts, and they were all under his name. After a while the stores stopped taking his stuff, I think he had a gambling problem and returns was his income.

Yeah, well, the autozone i worked at was in the ghetto... so we really didn't follow procedure when a couple guys came in and tried to walk out with a battery... i had to pull one of my co-workers off one of two of hte guys.. it was amazing. the best part was being the only white person in the entire store, so it all ended in the parking lot with everyone yelling at each other in spanish and me bringing up **** like "man, this is like a ****ed up episode of i love lucy or some ****.. i REALLY wish i knew spanish right now because all this is sounding like is one of those dumb ass soap opera's"... it was pretty awesome.

Ive been working at a Parts store part time for the last 4 months now. It is by far the worse job I have ever had. I love cars and working on them but I cannot stand dealing with these people all day. So many hack jobs and stubborn people. I cannot wait to graduate university in a couple months and get my ass out of there.