Allstate Motor Club review: Roadside assistance

Could not possibly be any worse. Negative stars into infinity. This is my second bad experience with Allstate Motor Club.

In this case, I called for a jump start when I found my car battery was dead. I had just arrived at long-term parking after a cross-country flight and it was well after midnight. The first problem is that it's almost impossible to call for roadside assistance with Allstate--you have to have the app downloaded, and if you don't have it already, you need to download the app and set up an account, thereby draining your cell phone battery and going through all these time-consuming and unnecessary steps when the whole reason you're calling them is that you have some kind of roadside emergency and you need help in a timely manner. So none of that makes sense, except in the exploitative capitalist system that refuses to hire sufficient workers and then offloads as much extra work as possible to the customers who are paying for the services that they end up providing at least partially themselves.

Here I was, my car battery was dead, my cell battery was getting dangerously close to dead, and it took herculean effort to actually reach a person. Sadly, both of the people I spoke with were spectacularly unhelpful and the opposite of forthcoming with information. They could not/would not tell me an ETA for dude who would jumpstart the car.

By this time, it was about 1:30 a.m. and I'd been awake for literally 27 hours and been alone in the barren darkness of long-term parking for over an hour, and there had not been one other person passing by the entire time. When I told the person on the phone that I really needed an ETA because my cell phone battery would die soon and that I was alone in the middle of the night in a remote location, her tone got a little snippy in that fake-pleasant manner and she said, "Thank you and have an amazing day!" and hung up on me. Then I got a text message advising that dude's ETA was 88 minutes.

The complete lack of interest in or concern for my safety and the equally comprehensive failure in customer service inspired me to cancel the service. I called a family member out of their sound sleep and went on with my life. The next morning, I cancelled my Allstate motor club membership and signed up with AAA. It's not often that a business doubles and triples down on their position that the customer does not at all in any way matter to them, but when they do, the only possible response is to walk away.