Last Sunday, the Traverse decided to reward me after a successful meeting with a client that ended *VERY* happily with a blown heater hose less than ten minutes later on what ended up being an aborted trip to Fayetteville and then Campbell to collect Katie to reunite her with her car.
The symptoms came on suddenly right before the I-87/I-440 split and they were eerily similar to the incident on the flyover ramp literally right in front of me four years ago…all sorts of warnings on the driver information display (which was thankfully working!) combined with dire warnings to shut down the engine immediately.
It turns out that it was the heater hose that had sheared from the fitting on the engine and spewed coolant all over the place.
So I figured I’d get a new hose (actually, it’s a three hose octopus-looking thingy) and take advantage of my eldest son’s as he is far more learned in the automotive mechanical arts than myself.
The journey of discovery that has been the mending of the Traverse is still ongoing and will have it’s own detailed debrief but essentially we’re at the point where Nicholas and I have removed the old hose (not a fun process!) and now it’s a matter of fitting the new one and topping off the coolant in the radiator.
Just one problem…I apparently ordered the wrong hose from AutoZone.
I discovered that this morning when I was going to try to surprise Nicholas by fitting the new hose by myself which really should be much simpler than extracting the old one, especially as we’ll be using a worm clamp on the fitting to the heater core at the firewall hell and gone from the Traverse’s bow rather than those pinch-style hose clamps which are a…well, another word for female canine.
Bummer.
So off I pop to AutoZone to return the part I’d ordered in error as instructed in the EMAIL confirmation and perhaps have them go ahead and order the replacement if they were willing to do an exchange.
Ah, no. It was clear that wasn’t going to to happen so I figured I’ll just have them do the refund and then I’ll re-order through the website which I already had ready to rock at The Nerdery.
We go through the process of returning the obviously incorrect hose assembly and that seems to go relatively smoothly once I translate the lady’s attempts at English into something actually coherent and understandable.
Where it goes a little sideways is that I noticed what was supposedly being refunded to the card was $5 less than what had been charged and that was a bit unexpected. The $5 is the fee I paid to get the hose to the house prior to Nicholas returning from training in Winston-Salem so that we’d have a chance at mending the Traverse this weekend before having to get really creative with the car arrangements thanks to his employer putting him in a hire car to make that drive to training!
Thanks Leith Toyota! 🙂
She calls her manager round and his immediate take was that I needed to “read the fine print” (making the assumption I hadn’t which is only partially true) and that the shipping fee isn’t refundable presumably due to AutoZone’s terms and conditions.
Fair enough until you consider that during the checkout process, at no point was the “rush fee” listed as non-refundable.
Indeed, if you look at the terms and conditions online closely which are not linked in the checkout process so they’re not easily consulted in-situ, they mention shipping fees being reimbursable only if “AutoZone made a shipping error of if the product was defective” but that’s only under the “Product Return By Mail” section, not the “Product Return to an Autozone Store”!
Also in the bit about when you get credited for returning the part, no mention is made of potentially withholding shipping charges there either.
I think the argument can be made that whoever drafted their terms and conditions and provided requirements to the programmers in the back-end system (which was a 3270 “green screen” terminal session the likes of which I’d not seen in the wild for 20 years since even that bastion of ancient technologies *LOWE’S* finally updated their back-end servers to something more 1990’s vintage) intended that shipping fees (which I’d presume they’d consider that “rush fee” to be a part of shipping) were non-refundable.
But that’s not what the actual text implies by what is said and where it’s said either at point of sale or in the T&Cs.
The employees were polite enough but if the manager goes immediately to a bit of condescension with that “read the fine print” crack as if it’s completely my mistake (and I’ll admit that ordering the wrong hose was mine and mine alone), it’s clearly a question they’ve heard before (likely many times before!) in this particular store in front of the Mos Eisley Wal-Mart and there is an expectation that they should be better versed with what their policies actually say rather than what they wish them to be.
Was it worth $5 to try to have the Traverse mended in a more timely fashion?
Yes.
Can I understand AutoZone not wanting to part with $5 they paid to FedEx because I was a bozo that ordered the wrong part by mistake?
Yep.
But at the same time, perhaps AutoZone might want to understand that customers that are strapped for cash in an increasingly dire economy where every aspect of capitalism as practised in this country seems to be as anti-consumer as humanly possible that we should expect them to adhere to the written word they impose upon us in the T&Cs just as much as they demand and enforce it upon us.
Sometimes a little understanding and compassion when mistakes occasionally happen from a company that turned over $17B in revenue in 2023 would go a long way toward earning some grace to come their way and that $5 means a hell of a lot more to me than it ever will to them.
I probably will make the call to the “customer service” line (and we’ll see quickly enough if that’s as laughable as most of them seem to be these days) because I’m a bit annoyed at being talked down to and there needs to be some accountability for that (but in fairness, nowhere near as much as the gent with a viral TikTok video who busts a huge F-bomb laden rant ironically about AutoZone managers not knowing their policies on refunds!).
We’ll see what they have to say…
