Community Update

O’Reilly & Sons Autobody not only tacitly admitted to stealing $3200 for an alignment that didn’t happen but then tried to spin it without even the courtesy of an apology.

We brought our car in after an accident to the right front driver’s side. Three weeks later, the work was finished. I noticed that the steering wheel listed to the right but didn’t think much of it. We needed servicing at Ford so, not knowing about cars, figured it would be taken care of then. We dropped the car off at Ford for brake work and I asked them to look at the steering. They told me the control arm was bent and that the car needed aligning. I told them the car had been aligned. They told me that with a bent control arm that was in impossible. I called our insurance agency which confirmed that the paid O’Reilly & Sons $3200 to do an alignment. I double checked with Ford to make sure that an alignment couldn’t be done with a bent control arm. Their response: “Absolutely not.”

Bernie’s reaction to this news was not to sound shocked and apologetic but to ask if I’d hit any pot holes recently. After that, he tried to spin his way out of it. After 10 minutes of talking, he finally admitted that you could not align a car with a bent control arm. And yet…he continued to lie directly to my face about “having to check the paper work”. Obviously, checking the paper work is beside the point. As he admitted, you can’t do an alignment with a bent control arm. That’s not about paper work. O’Reilly & Sons took the money. They did not do the work. Even after pointing out that I’d received no apology, no apology came.

Perhaps this was an anomalous incident. But given Bernie’s treatment of a very serious problem, I advised staying as far away from O’Reilly & Sons as humanly possible.