Meineke Car Care Center

Avoid taking your car here! My wife and I used to go here for routine oil changes, and I was never super happy with the service here, but they got the job done, so whatever. But then her car needed some other work – it was making a noise, so we asked them to look at it, and were told that we needed new struts. They also found a problem with the drive belt tensioner, so we went ahead and had them replace that too.
Well, a few months later, after I had already decided to start going to a different mechanic, her car starts making a horrible noise from the front end. Our new mechanic says that it’s coming from the belt tensioner, the very same one Meineke had replaced not long before. I took it back to Meineke and they tried to tell me the noise was coming from the water pump instead. Giving them benefit of the doubt, I asked the other mechanic to double check. As it turns out, the water pump was indeed starting to go bad, but the noise we were hearing was definitely coming from the tensioner. My new guy even replaced the water pump while we were waiting for the tensioner part to come in, and the noise was still there. Once the tensioner part did arrive, he replaced it and it the noise was gone just like that. Needless to say, I was not very happy with the guys at Meineke at that point in time.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the struts we had purchased needed replacing after less than 10,000 miles. Our new mechanic said that Meineke used crappy struts that are only ever good for a car you’re about to sell. But that didn’t stop them from charging significantly MORE than what our new guy charged us for the good struts! In retrospect, I kind of wish I had gone back to Meineke one more time and demanded that they make it right, but at the time I was just fed up from dealing with their dishonesty and vowed never to go back.

Have had a lot of work done on different cars over the years. Now moved out of the area and missing them. Friendly, fair and competent. Hard to beat that.

Ok. So my father took my car here as my brake light was on and I was curious to why. They gave him a quote over the phone after looking at the car saying that my brakes were worn down completely and they needed to be replaced immediately. I told my dad to tell them «no» and that he should look at them himself. I thought $ 490 sounded a bit high for that. When my father looked at them he brought me outside and showed me that Meineke had lied through their teeth and tried to rip us off. The breaks all still had more than half of their pads left and were barely worn at all, which is what was expected since the car was just bought!
Another story involves my girlfriend. She brought her car and they told her that her cheap car used specialty spark plugs that would be $ 80-​$ 100 each. I thought that was insane and did some research only to find that the spark plugs her car takes are all less than $ 5 each. Another rip off!
Trust your instincts with there guys, they will try to rip you off.