Our tires were made out of sand!

     Yesterday, to get ready for a trip to Vegas this weekend, we took Shauna's car in to Costco to get the tires rotated and balanced and checked out. After wandering around the warehouse for about 45 minutes, we got a call from the tech and he told us that he couldn't do the tires because they were bald! This immediately frustrated Shauna (for lack of more colorful words) because she had personally purchased the tires herself just 2 years ago, almost to the day! Furthermore, the tires had a 45,000 mile warranty on them and we had only put about 24,000 on them. We went to talk with the tech and he showed us that, sure enough, the front tires were worn down to the wear bars. His first comment to us was, "Well, you gotta rotate and balance your tires every 6-8 thousand miles, and you haven't been doing that, blah blah blah, so now you have no warranty. Sucks to be you." (More or less, I may be paraphrasing. But he seriously had the 'get out of my face stupid customer' air about him.) So, we started arguing with him because Shauna was told at a different Costco last year when she had the tires done (at about 12,000 miles, only 4,000 miles over their recommended mileage) that she only needed to have that done "oh, ya know, every so often" and was told nothing about the warranty depending on it. Then, the guy turned to the paperwork we had (we always keep the paperwork/invoices for stuff like this), and he realizes that we didn't even 'purchase' the tires because Shauna's name wasn't on the invoice.

     That's a whole other story that Shauna can fill you in on later. Short version is that while traveling back to California from Utah a couple years ago, Shauna's car broke down. She was carpooling with her friend whose dad happened to be a couple hours' drive away, so he came and swapped them cars so Shauna could make a flight. While he was driving her car home, it blew a tire (it wasn't a good summer for her car), so he took it to Costco and bought a new tire under his membership. Shauna, after returning from her trip a couple weeks later, took the car back to Costco and purchased three more tires herself but under his membership so they could get the 'buy 4' discount. And yet, that wasn't good enough for this tech. It was pretty much game over at that point.

     Not even once did he concede that, hey, that sucks the tires we sold you were made out of sand, let's see what we can do for you. Not once did he apologize or sympathize or feel anything. And I guess we really didn't feel anything either as we drove half a mile up the street to Discount Tire Co. and dropped $50 more than Costco would've charged for 4 brand spankin' new tires. Eat that, Costco!

     And that reminds me: the dude at Costco told us we needed to replace only the two front tires and that the two back tires "were fine, and that tells me there's something wrong with your car that you'll want to get fixed blah blah blah". We got to Discount Tire and the guy looked at our tires for 10 seconds and showed me how all four tires were worn down to the wear bars. I asked him about the front tires because it did appear to me as if we had an alignment problem (the tires were very worn only on the outside edge), and he told me it was actually fairly normal for tires to wear like that and if we weren't having any problems with the car pulling to one direction or the other (which we weren't) that we didn't have an alignment problem.

     The moral of the story:

• If you buy new tires, be aware of the terms of the warranty, i.e., be aware of when they need to be rotated and balanced, and DO IT, no matter what the tech says. Like the guy at Discount told us, some people, at every company, are pretty chill about the rules like that and some people are pretty strict, so it's best just to get it done the strict way to avoid our situation (meeting the strict guy after we met the chill guy). And, remember routine tire maintenance is (or should be) free.
  
• If you want some awesome sand-based evaporative-rubber dissolves-on-asphalt won't-last-past-half-their-life tires, then we highly recommend Michelin tires.

     And, just to make certain we didn't have any money left at the end of the day, we stopped by Jiffy Lube on the way home for an oil change.