Walmart

On August 25th 2010 I brought my car to Walmart Tire and Lube Store #2671 1175 S Arizona Ave, Chandler AZ. Besides the oil change I asked them to change the oil filter the air filter and to also change 2 tires, balance them. I want to clarify that my car was in perfect conditions before I brought it to Walmart. After around 2 hours they spent working on my car they called me saying it was ready. I picked it up around 5pm and drove home, on my way though, the light of the coolant on the front console start flashing but as I lived 30 minutes from the store and I was almost arriving my place I decided not to return to the store immediately but to go home, call them and ask them what did they do with my car. After waiting long minutes on an automatic machine I finally could talk with the person in charge of the Tire and Lube store. He told me they just did what I asked them to do and that they didn't mess with the coolant system at all. As the store was closing soon the asked me to go the next day to have my car checked. That afternoon after visual inspection under the hood I could see that the coolant liquid was lower than usual.
The next day in the morning I opened the hood again just to find out no coolant at all! Obviously there was a leak somewhere. I didn't risk it to go all the way to walmart, so I went around the corner to BigOTires where they found out that the upper radiator hose which connects the coolant with the radiator was broken and worst that it had been glued to provide a temporally solution. I went mad and after paying 226.77 dollars for replacing the broken hose and adding new coolant, I went to walmart and put a claim, complaining on walmart broking the upper radiator hose, gluing it to provide a temporally solution and not telling me what happened, risking the life of my car's motor, not to mention my own life as this incident could lead to a sudden accident on the highway.
The weird misbehavior of walmart didn't end up there. I put a claim on August 26th 2010 and the person in charge, I believe his name is Dean Rust, told me that I should receive shortly a letter from Claims Management. After two weeks I went back to walmart and complaint about my claim and that I didn't receive, nor heard about it in 2 weeks. The person in charge checked the claim and just told me "I don't know why but something happened and it didn't go through, let me try it again". I stayed calm and just told them to please understand my situation the car was working perfectly before the oil change, the person changing the oil, the oil filter and air filter may had stepped badly on the hose and after breaking it tried to glue it. Anyway, the claim went through this time and after a couple of days I received a letter on September 9th from Steven Redetzke from "CMI, Claims Management, inc. Respect Service Excellence". He took my case and told me he would ask walmart for the video of that day and revise it for any weird behavior of the workers under the hood. On October 8th I received another letter from CMI from the case manager Steven Redetzke, saying that a decision concerning my claim had been taken. I called him and he just limited his time to tell me that my car was already 10 years old and that that could happened by chance. He added that he didn't need to ask for the video and just limited to ask Walmart for a report on the case. I tried to make my point on the fact that it is really suspicious that the car has been working perfectly and just after an oil change the radiator hose is broken, appeared to be glued and specially that "no way" I could have been driving the car in that conditions over to walmart in the first instance. No positive answer regarding my claim came from Steven Redetzke who stopped listening to my complains and in an impolite and unprofessional way tried to get rid of me on the phone by saying a couple of times "This conversation is over".

Now, the only thing that is left to me is to advice everyone out there to stop buying at Walmart, not only for the bad quality of the products and services but also for the irresponsible behavior they show everyday to their customers, I am not alone there are plenty of this type of cases complaining against Walmart, I just wish I had listened to them before.

Jesús Navarro