Big O - Big Disappointment


Big O Tires, a national chain of tire dealers who also do a fair amount of mechanical repair, is being let down by two factors - their lack of commitment to customer service, and the people they hire.  My recommendation:  There are lots of tire dealers out there - find one that's not Big O.  The story behind this recommendation is a bit long and convoluted, but please hang in there with me.

Here's what happened, from the very beginning.  Last year, I arrived at the Big O dealership on North Nellis Blvd. in Las Vegas - it's the closest tire place to where I live and work (and where I'd bought the last three sets of tires for the car), about ten minutes before closing. Their door was open, and the sign saying "Open" was still illuminated.  However, when I went in and asked to be taken care of (as a customer), I was sent away.  The fact that they were still open made no difference to the manager (whether he was the overall manager or just the manager-of-the-day, I don't know).  He sent me away without even trying to handle my car's problem.

So I went home, and still pissed off at this cavalier treatment, I went to the Big O website and explained what happened.  The next day or two, I got a call from a regional manager, who assured me that what happened was at odds with Big O policy; as well as the fact that they'd had other complaints about this individual, who was no longer working for them. I was then offered a free oil change - all I had to do was call this regional manager when I was ready, and he'd take care of it.   However, I'd just had the oil changed, and by the time I was ready, I'd misplaced his name and number, and that ended that. But at least they tried to make it up to me.

Fast forward to Sunday of last week (July 7) and once again, I was having problems - the car was pulling to the right, and the front end was making a rhythmic noise unlike any I'd heard before. Having driven across the Valley to attend a writer's meeting, on the way home, it seemed to be getting worse by the minute. So I headed straight over to Big O (where I'd bought the tires on my car), about 4:50 p.m.  When I said I needed help, the guy behind the desk told me that they were closing in 10 minutes, and that I'd have to come back another time.  So much for the regional manager's assurance that this wasn't policy with the company.

So, another visit to their website, another complaint with details (of both incidents), and then I waited.  It was three days before they got back to me, and instead of hearing from the regional manager, I heard from the store manager.  In an almost deja vu (part II), he asked me what he could do to win back my business, offering me a free oil change.  This is where a bit of backstory needs to come in to make things clear.

By this time, I had a more serious complaint than just having been turned away.  Here's what happened:

The next morning after I'd been turned away, the morning after I'd contacted their customer service website, I went out to my car to go to a doctor's appointment, only to see the left front tire not just flat, but with a sidewall hole large enough to swallow a baseball.  Since I'd only recently gotten out of the hospital, and since it was already well over 100 degrees (hey, this is Vegas, baby!), I was not physically up to changing it myself, a fact I confirmed after I'd tried.  So I called a service that would come change the tire for my spare, for $84.00.  They came promptly, fitted my full-service spare (I hate those undersized "donut" tires, so I'd bought a wheel and put my best tire on it the last time I'd gotten new tires.  Once it was on the car, the problem I'd had of the car pulling to the right was completely gone. Instead of bad alignment, this had been caused by an about-to-fail front tire.

So I told the store manager that anything in the realm of winning me back would have to involve fixing or replacing the blown tire, which I'd bought there and assumed was still under some kind of warranty.  He asked me if I had the paperwork (I don't know if I do), but I suggested that he look in his computer, which had records of all my previous service visits and purchases - I knew this because I'd seen it once on their computer screen.  Anyway, he told me to come by and he'd take care of me, and we made an appointment for me to come late Friday morning.

When I got there, I spoke again to the manager who'd called me - he'd been waiting for me.  I gave him the keys, reminded him about the tire, which was in the trunk, then headed across the parking lot to grab lunch. I figured that both the tire and the oil change would be taken care of by the time I finished.  An hour later, when I got back, my car was up on the grease rack, and so far as I could tell, nothing had been done to it.

I went inside and asked the guy behind the counter how my car was doing.  He said I needed rear brakes, that it was metal-on-metal.  This made no sense as I'd had the brakes serviced within the past year, and even in Vegas, brakes don't wear out that quickly.  Turns out, he thought I was someone else, and that the brake problem was a false alarm.  However, as an author and writing coach (which I am), I should have seen it as foreshadowing.

Eventually, I got the manager's attention and asked him how my car was coming. He said they were working on it, then left to check on it.  A few minutes later I was called to the counter where a mechanic told me I needed a front-end alignment, that would cost $108.  Which puzzled me, as I hadn't said anything about the front end pulling to the right - I can't imagine why he'd even checked this.  So I told him, "not at this time."  I didn't go into detail why, but I could tell he was trying to up-sell me, and I wasn't buying it.

So I asked him about the blown tire in the trunk. He seemed not to know that this was the real reason I'd come by the shop - oil changes I can get almost anywhere - in 15 minutes, instead of 75 minutes - and they aren't expensive enough to go to a place I'd had a series of increasingly-bad experiences at.  I was there to get the tire fixed or replaced, at no cost to me.  But they hadn't even looked at it.  I handed the mechanic the keys and he went out, looked briefly in my trunk, then came back to tell me I needed three tires, and could he write them up.  However, I'd looked at all my tires and they seemed to have lots of tread-life left ... beside which, he hadn't even looked at the four tires before making this sweeping diagnosis.  Apparently, he thought I had "idiot" written all over my face - but instead, I couldn't wait to get out of there.

So, in attempting to win back my business, they tried to cheat me - twice - with unnecessary upsells, even while they had also completely ignored the real and important reason I had been there.

I'm not going back, and if you do business with Big O, you might want to rethink this decision, unless, of course, you like wasting money on repairs you don't need, based on the words of a mechanic who seems to be on commission for up-selling their services.

So, caveat emptor - let the buyer beware!

Bye Bye (Not Buy Buy) Nike

Bye Bye (Not Buy Buy) Nike

It makes absolutely no sense for a corporation which earns billions of dollars by selling to people regardless of their political beliefs to take sides in a contentious and ongoing political debate. Doing so ensures that they're going to (to one degree or another) alienate roughly half the voting and buying public.  This is not rocket science, either. At age of soon-to-be 67, I can't recall ever seeing the country I love so politically-divided.  Sure, we had a close Presidential race in 1992 (thanks to Perot, it was a three-way race, and no candidate got a majority), and again in 2000 when the Supreme Court had to decide who won (it wasn't Chad, who was apparently hanging wrong).

However, the election of politically indefinable billionaire populist Donald Trump at the expense of the unwilling-to-admit-she's-really-a-socialist-progressive Hillary Clinton has divided the country in ways – and at a level of volatility and vitriol – that I don't think has prevailed since the Civil War.  All we need now are the smooth-bore cannon, saber-wielding horsemen and rifled muskets firing Minie Balls and we’d be back in 1861.

Into this debate having nothing to do with sporting gear or clothing, Nike has thrust themselves by boldly siding with anti-American (or at least anti-Traditional American) progressives against those who, by a solid Electoral College (but not raw vote total), achieved a stunning victory in 2016.  This may make Nike’s decision-makers feel all warm and politically correct in their Manhattan solons, and might also help Nike sell more branded college football gear to university teams whose institutional masters are wracked with fear of micro-aggressions and eager to avoid virtue shamings. But regardless of the reason, this act is going to hit Nike where it really hurts – in their sales, profits, market share and bottom line. 

No "sane" company would willingly decide to alienate half of the entire potential US market, yet that's what Nike just did. This makes me wonder if they are, in fact, sane – or if, perhaps – those decision-makers live and work in that Manhattan/Hollywood/San Francisco bubble that doesn't recognize that more Americans hate them than support them.

Just what is this all about, anyway?

As a believer in the bottom line, Nike’s action left me breathless with surprise. The executive management and the board of Nike have made the decision to use America-hating (or at least Traditional-America-hating) Colin Kaepernick the new “face” of Nike’s “Just Do It” multi-million-dollar ad campaign.  Kaepernick, is, of course, the first NFL player to publicly “take a knee” rather than to stand respectfully during the singing of the National Anthem.  The leaders at Nike are apparently intent on profiting from the dubious fame garnered by a former (benched) NFL second-string football player who became the face of anti-American efforts to turn the NFL games away from being sporting events and into part of an ongoing, far-left progressive political campaign. 

What the good folks at Nike haven't counted on is the backlash that will be so profound and pervasive that – even without a formal boycott.  Just for the record, I am NOT calling for a boycott – I don’t like them, and in this case, a formal boycott’s not necessary.  Boycott or not, Nike has just taken an action – one they can’t easily walk back – that will cost them a huge segment of the American market.  And not just for now, but for a long time to come.

This should come at no surprise, for two reasons – one scientific, the other logical without being easily proven.  First, published surveys showed that half or more of all those Americans who watched less football in the 2017-2018 season did so primarily or exclusively because they strongly disapproved of the actions of Kaepernick and his followers.  This statistical backlash cost the NFL hundreds of millions in unsold tickets and un-sold (or sold for far lower prices) ads on TV networks carrying games which couldn't attract a live, in-stadium or a live, at-home audience.

There are other examples of how Americans react to other Americans who seem intent on hating America.  Perhaps the most well-known celebrity who spoke out against America was "Hanoi Jane" Fonda, who – 50 years after her flirtation with North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunners whose job it was to kill American servicemen – remains a hated figure who is (personally – not formally) boycotted by millions, reducing her box office draw in movies and TV shows.  While Kaepernick's name will soon be forgotten (he doesn't the family Hollywood "Royalty" cache that has helped Hanoi Jane's name remain well-known) Americans who don't like what Kaepernick and his ilk are doing will be remembered, by the name "Nike."

I am an American who believes that standing respectfully during the National Anthem is an appropriate way of beginning sporting events, governmental meetings and other gatherings.  Others are free to hold a different perspective ... but I don't have to do business with them.  Converse All Stars is going to benefit from my commerce at the expense of Nike, who has just lost my custom – for shoes, golf shirts, baseball hats and other Nike-branded gear that I might otherwise have worn.  Taking advantage of the laid-back nature of my home city for the past 30 years (Las Vegas), I've recently made a "business move" to dress more casually – including substituting jeans, t-shirts, baseball hats, loud Hawaiian shirts or "polo" shirts ... and athletic shoes in place of button-down Oxford Cloth dress shirts and highly-shined wing-tips ... or even dressy-casual Bass Weejuns.  For years now, I’ve been changing my wardrobe from three piece suits and Florshiems to the more casual gear Nike brands and sells.

Well, thanks to their move to interject themselves into a national political debate that’s got nothing with athletic shoes, ball-caps or sport shirts, they've just lost me for a client.


Ned Barnett is a branding and marketing expert, ghost-writer and writing coach working in Las Vegas as founder of Barnett Marketing Communications.  He can be reached at 702-561-1167 or ned@barnettmarcom.com.

You're not going to believe this, but it's true - and these people "think" they're professionals in the PR world

I logged on today to the RadioGuestList.com and decided to buy one of their packages, the better to serve a new client I landed today (plus to better serve other clients I already have).  The service I selected was their weekly dump of all new radio guest opportunities – the price (on their website) was $4.97, with a note that I should act quickly because it would soon double in price – they specifically said I needed to act now to “lock the lower price in.”   

Uh, yeah. 

Not a big fan of that “act now or we shoot your dog” kind of marketing, but they made their point.

So I clicked purchase, and instead of $4.97, the price was listed as $5.97.  A month. So I’m kvetching about $12 a year, right?  Hardly worth it.  But wait, there’s more … (and by the way, I’d show you the "more" but they’ve already changed their website).

Anyway, thinking there was  a glitch, I wrote to note that they’d screwed up their pricing (based on what was said on their website), thinking they’d do the right thing and honor their posted price. Instead, I got this email note:

“Hi Ned,

Sorry about that.  The price is $5.97.

Looks like we missed updating that on the website after raising the price recently.”

Frankly, I’m absolutely gobsmacked.  They’re pissing off a prospective client (who has access to thousands of other prospective clients) for a buck a month? Incredible.  I guess we’re witnessing the death-throes of customer service and professional integrity.   

Damn, skippy, but this is disappointing.

Self Publishing School's "100 Percent Guarantee" Isn't What It Seems to Promise

I would like to warn readers away from a writing service that seems to have scam-like characteristics, especially when it comes to honoring their "100 percent refund guarantee." This regards a writing support service offered by Chandler Bolt's Self Publishing School, which offers a 90-day "Bootcamp" for $497, or $600 if you pay in three equal portions, which is what I did.

Here's what happened: I signed up for the 90-day bootcamp and made the initial $200 payment, and while the materials offered were not bad (not great, but not bad), I quickly realized I had over-stretched my personal-time resources, and I wasn't able to keep up with the 90-day program. Since they offered a 100 percent money-back guarantee, I asked for a refund. That's when the horror story began.

Instead of honoring their request, they made me jump through seven "flaming hoops" (i.e., complete seven specific tasks, including creating a book outline and writing an introduction and at least ten pages from the first chapter) before I would qualify for their guarantee. This was all new to me - that was NOT made clear in the promo material.

As a result, I had to spend nine hours completing these seven steps, creating the "proof that I'd given the course a chance" (even though that wasn't the issue, and they knew it). Then I had to send this information to them - even to the point of using my phone camera to take pictures of my screen since I've never known how to take a "screenshot."

So I sent in all that material as an attachment to a return email (return from the email which spelled out the requirements). Then, about 10 days later, while still waiting for my promised refund, I got another email. This one said I had to re-send these items via either Dropbox or Google Docs - a process that exceeds my admittedly-limited tech-ability (i.e., I know you can do that, but I've never known how to do that). This one also said that the refund offer was only good for 30 days (and they'd eaten up nearly two weeks in this back-and-forth, leaving me to think that by the time I finally complied, I'd be told I was "too late" for the "100 percent guarantee" that I'd get my refund, just for asking.

While a reminder of the deadline seemed threatening, the re-send demand just seemed absurd, since they'd already received (and acknowledged receipt of) the proof that I'd taken those seven steps. Suddenly, that "guarantee" seemed a lot more like a bait-and-switch than a legitimate offer - no matter what I did, they kept adding new and (for me) nearly impossible tasks.

Finally, in frustration, I called the company then emailed the owner (who never replied) - but finally, after a flurry of emails and phone calls, I finally got someone's attention. Earlier today, I finally got my refund. But if I hadn't been persistent, I'm sure I'd have been out of luck, refund-wise.

What is my warning here? Before you commit big bucks to any writer-help organization, check out the specific terms of delivery of services, as well as the specifics of their refund policy (if any). Don't get stuck like I was.

Outback Steakhouse Strikes Out

It's been a while since I last ate at Outback Steakhouse, but primarily because my work environment changed so I wasn't frequently on that side of town, but I had reason to go to Henderson Nevada today so I dropped by the Outback on Stephanie for a good meal.  Actually, I stopped by to get a GREAT meal, but that's not what was served.  Well, their Diet Coke was above average (which is another story for another blog), and the loaf of bread was the same as always (which is good - it's not my favorite bread, but it's exactly what it's always been - good enough to enjoy), although even this wasn't hot, but had obviously been sitting out for a while.

But instead of Diet Coke or fresh bread I went to Outback for a medium rare ribeye steak, a Caesar's salad and their garlic mashed potatoes, the meal I always choose when I go there.  First came the salad.  Have you ever had a dry Caesar's salad?  I didn't think it was possible, but in this I was wrong.  There wasn't enough dressing to bring the lettuce to life.  Big disappointment, but it's just a "side" so, all other things being equal, I wouldn't object.  However, then came the steak. 

Right up front, I looked at it and was stunned. It was small.  Really small. Since I order the same steak almost every time, this wasn't just a guess.  It looked to be at least a quarter, maybe a third smaller than usual.  Which wouldn't have been so bad except it also seemed to have more than usual fat and gristle.  Finally (this is the trifecta of disappointing steaks), the steak seemed to have been over-tenderized, to the point where it was falling apart. I'd never realized how the texture of meat impacts it's appeal and enjoyment.

Finally, the garlic mashed. Not sure how you can screw this up, but it was as dry as the salad.

Ok, that covers the meal.  When I paid (by one of those damned machines on the table - for the prices I pay at Outback I'd like to deal with a real person, but maybe that's just me), I was asked to take a survey, which I did, and ended it by including a text message to the store management.  It couldn't have been a message that the manager wanted to get, but I'm truly surprised that the manager didn't immediately reach out to me, if only to apologize, if not to try and make it right.  But so far, not so much.

Maybe it's just the Outback at Stephanie, but when I consider the size and quality of the steak, I've got to believe that this is a corporate decision to downsize the meal instead of raising the price.

If you're jonesing for a steak, you might do better somewhere else than Outback Steakhouse. I know the next time I want a steak, I'll find another place to go.

Fifty-Fifty Alert - My Pillow - Not All Bad, But Sure as Hell Not All Good

We both have sleep problems, so eventually the commercials wore us down and we got the buy-one, get-one-free, My Pillow, then gave them a try.  The vote is 50-50.  Lynn likes her My Pillow just fine; I gave up on mine within less than a week.  So instead of a good deal on a $50 pillow, we got a less-good deal, $99 for one pillow (the other one is not being used, nor is it going to be used, except for the cat, who likes it just fine).  Basically, you'll either like it or hate it, and if you can find someone who has one and give it a try before you buy, you will likely be far happier than I am.  Ask Lynn and you'll get a very different answer, because she likes her My Pillow.

One final note - My Pillow is fighting (and settling for seven-figure sums) lawsuits about health and other claims. I know nothing about this, but it wouldn't be fair to my readers (both of you) without mentioning this.

The Fine Art of Losing A Loyal Customer - Big O Tires

I have been a loyal customer of Big O Tires - the local operation on North Nellis Blvd. in Las Vegas - for more than 20 years.  The reasons are simple.  They are close, they provide good service at good prices, and most of all, they respect me as a customer and as an individual.  As I get older, that respect has become more important to me - life is too short to be treated rudely by people who are nonetheless eager to take my money.  But that had not been a problem ... until late last month.

I was getting ready for a 3,000-mile trip to see the kids and grandkids over the holiday, and I needed an oil and filter change and new tires - so I headed to Big O.  It was about 5:40 p.m., and the store had always been open until 7, so I saw no problem.  When I got there I saw they now closed at 6, so I figured I'd get the oil changed then, and I'd get the tires the next day. 

However, I was turned away.  They said they couldn't change the oil before six, when they closed.  There was no sense of recognition that they were creating a problem for me, nor were they apparently aware that, in addition to turning me away, they were being rude.  This was an entirely new attitude - they'd always been accommodating, until the time when I really needed them.

As problems go, this was a small one. Jiffy Lube was more than happy to take my money for an oil change, a new filter, a fuel system cleaning and new wiper blades - all for about the same, or maybe a bit less, than Big O would have charged.  And I had no problem finding a tire store - at 6:30 on a Friday night - who'd sell me four new tires, two new wheels (I'd had one stolen while I was in the hospital - talk about adding insult to injury) because I wanted a full-sized spare for the trip. 

Big O lost all of that business - in the grand scheme of things, this is not a problem for Big O (they can live without $750 or so) - but they've also lost my future custom - so no more tires, no more oil changes, no more servicing every 3,000 miles, no more me.  That won't shut them down, either.

HOWEVER ... if you want good service and a modicum of respect, you can no longer count on Big O Tires to give you what you're looking for. There are many competitors - so, like me, go looking for someone else to provide your nuts-and-bolts, bread-and-butter car service.