Sitting In The Tire Store

Do you like watching the world around you? I have found a great place for you. I am sitting in the waiting area of a tire store.

First off, it is a place where nobody wants to be. It is not as bad as the waiting room for a hospital emergency room – I have sat in one of those too, and that is really grim. But getting new tires is not much more fun than getting stitches, though it is at least cheaper.

There are no captains of industry here. Those are people who buy their tires attached to a new car, and typically trade before those factory-equipped tires are worn out. Instead, we have a cross-section of middle-class America. The parking lot is full of middle-aged Hondas, Toyotas, and American pickups and SUVs. All owned by people having a bad tire day.

Me? I am here because I ordered a set of four new tires for my cheap old car. Let me tell you, $1000 worth of tires on a $3000 car is a level of commitment you will not often see from me. I guess I am keeping this car until I really retire and no longer need a cheap second commuter car. My tires had seemed decently serviceable, but then one started needing air every 3 days or so. I was managing until another one started leaking down every 24 hours. After a week or two of that, I decided that it was time.

My day could be worse, because I was able to buy my tires online and schedule an appointment for installation. This way, all of the hard and expensive decisions were made in advance (as well as all of the paying).

Some of the other people here are just having their tires checked out because of a flat, or a leak, or something else. The potholes in my area can be brutal, and they seldom provide a convenient opportunity for scheduling. And then there is the dizzying assortment of what the tire people call “road hazards” – nails, glass, or other things that sit quietly on the road just waiting for a chance to leap up and administer a fatal stabbing to one of your car’s rubber shoes. There lots of ways the tires on your car can let you down in the face of a better-armed foe.

There is a nice selection of adult-oriented oldies playing from a local radio station. Music is said to soothe the savage breast (not savage beast, although music will probably soothe some of those too). An aural anesthetic is apparently just the thing to have in the background as the nice men in the red shirts offer grief counseling following the death of a tire, or perhaps some (probably necessary) upselling on the need to buy a second new tire that matches the first one that is needed.

One guy was having a fairly good day, and was able to walk out with a pair of small tires mounted on wheels that were probably for a trailer or maybe a large riding mower. Smaller tires are cheaper, right?

There is a young-ish lady with more tattoos than I have seen in awhile getting her counseling session now. She has decided to pop for an entire set. She is actually much more patient than an older lady with a Cadillac, who is really ready to go NOW. Mrs. Cadillac mellowed a lot when the car was actually ready, though. The young real estate guy is paying close attention to the sales guy – though I have to wonder how much of what is being said is actually being understood. But he does understand that he probably should have paid for the road hazard warranty last time he was here.

I don’t mean to make judgments about these folks. They may themselves be glancing at the gray-haired guy tapping away on a laptop and wondering why he looks so engrossed in what he is doing. He is probably some corporate type working from a tire store instead of from home, they might reasonably (but wrongly) conclude. I would love to know more about these people and what their lives are like when they are not in a tire store. But I am far too introverted to start chatting with them. Besides, I have a blog post to write.

I have to confess that I really kind of like the smell inside of a tire business. The slightly acrid smell of the freshly-made tires is not disagreeable to me. Maybe because it is one of the components of “new car smell” that is always so intoxicating. And “new tire smell” is much less expensive. That not-unpleasant odor will permeate my garage for the next few days, and I look forward to it.

I do get one unpleasant surprise – It seems that I need to buy a new tire pressure senser to replace one that would not separate from the old valve stem inside of the wheel. How did we ever survive so many years without little devices to monitor our tire pressure for us? So I guess I am paying a little something today. Any day you can get out of a tire store for under $100 is a good day, right?

Once my car is ready, I walk around and admire the fresh new tires, that look so much better than the car they are on. On the way home, I take the long way to get a few minutes on a highway, and the old car tracks straight and true, with no pesky vibrations. It is a good day. And now, the little air compressor I keep in my garage will get a long-deserved rest.

31 thoughts on “Sitting In The Tire Store”

  1. I was out on a run the other day and saw a 3-inch nail in the road; picked that up and put it in the trash can at one end of the park. The number of lug nuts I see on the roads around here is a little horrifying.

    “Any day you can get out of a tire store for under $100 is a good day, right?”
    Grocery store too.

    I’m glad I’m at a point in my life I can pay someone to do the car stuff. I’m actually scheduled for an oil change this morning. I’ll take my work laptop down there with me and pretend to work from there instead of my home office for a while.

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    • I have not changed my own oil in a long time. I could do it, but I just don’t want to. I have also seen people mount a tire on a rim using only a tire iron, which I find really impressive!

      Haha, getting out of the grocery for under $100 is a real feat, alright. I seldom manage it.

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  2. This is a very “zen” look at sitting in the tire store! I have a very adversarial relationship with tires, because for some reason, I attract flats as if my tires were magnetic. I blame this all on living in a post industrial apocalypse city, that has a vast army of rusted and run down “Sanford and Son” style, lopsided pick-up trucks driving around the city and shedding metal detritus and screws at random, under the guise of “self-employed handy-men”. I bought a new car in 2020, and now five years in, I’ve had at least three or four flats, the last being the dreaded “flat so bad, it cannot be fixed”. This will result in a trip to the dealer for a tire that actually matches, and wherein you will pay more for a tire of that size and quality than you’ve ever paid before!

    My other complaint is about the dreaded “tire creep”, i.e. tires growing larger and larger on vehicles for no apparent reason. I spent many years driving inexpensive Japanese Econo boxes with 13 inch wheels, and their resultant cheap tire costs, and had zero problems with that size tire. I once got 4 – 60k mile Michelin tires, mounted and balanced, for $160! My last Toyota had a disturbing tire size of 15 inches, and now my current new car had a huge and unwanted 17 inch tire that is about 8 inches across the face! I expect to pay $1000. for 4 new tires when it’s time and have been saving up. Altho the model car I have, was offered with a few tires sizes, the manual transmission model only came with the 17 inch wheels. They are in collusion with “Big Tire”.

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    • In my job, I drive those areas you describe, with the overfull pickups (and the homeless scavengers pushing their grocery carts full of scrap) and flat tires on trucks and trailers are an almost weekly occurrence, especially if you hook to multiple trailers during the week.

      And yes, those big wheels make tires expensive. My Mazda was a high end model when it was new and has those dreaded 17 inch wheels. It is interesting that the selection for this car is far better than for my old Honda Fit, which had 15 inchers, but in an unusually wide size. I could not even find a Michelin tire to fit that one last time I got tires on it.

      When I was broke and in college, I learned that you could go to a tire store in a nice neighborhood and get really good used tires on the cheap. Around 1980-81 I got one set of 4 bias ply tires for $40, mounted and balanced. About a year and a half later, I got a set of whitewall radials with probably 50% of the tread left for $60, mounted and balanced. It is hard to beat $15/tire!! This probably isn’t something that works now, because all the old-timers who were used to replacing their tires at 2 or 3 years old even if they didn’t drive much have all died or stopped driving.

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      • My broke college “fall-back” tire position on my 1966 Olds Jetstar, was, when K-Mart was still a thing, and they had car care centers, the K-Mart brand called “Mohawk”. I think they were about 25 bucks mounted and balanced, and essentially were a very thick slab of rubber, with 4 squiggly lines down the middle! Todays tread patterns look like the Rosetta Stone compared to the Mohawk! I think they were good for about 25K miles, and certainly did NOT “handle” during a rain storm..

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  3. What I like about your blog, JPC–is that I almost always find experiences and perspectives I can relate to. It’s like we’re “cut from the same cloth” or something.🙂

    One advantage of living 1 block away from a large commercial/industrial zoned area is that there’s a tire shop within walking distance. So I don’t have to sit in the waiting room–I just drive my car over, walk home, and they call me when it’s ready!

    “I would love to know more about these people and what their lives are like when they are not in a tire store. But I am far too introverted to start chatting with them.” Yes, I know what you’re saying. I get lonely sometimes and I wonder about all the “average” folks I see when out in public. Some of them are probably amazing people that would love to get to know me (and vice-versa). But we’re all alienated from each other so we pass like ships in the night. It’s like I’ll read obituaries in the paper of people I don’t know, and they’ve led such interesting lives, and I say to myself, “I wish I could have met him or her.”

    My greatest tire bargain: When I bought my ’58 Ford in 2014, the tires were dry rotted and coming apart so I needed new tires. I went to the local junkyard and bought a matched set of correct-size radials with whitewalls–$100 for all four ($25 each). To this day, the tires have no cracks or leaks and virtually no wear on them. They’re B.F. Goodrich “Control Plus”.

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    • You make me think that I could have avoided real commitment to this car by buying a pair of junkyard tires, but I think the time involved (which would have probably involved a trip to a tire store to mount and balance them anyway) would have made me avoid them. As I mentioned in a comment above, my best deal was years before yours – $15 each, mounted and balanced, for a set of whitewall radials on my 1971 Plymouth Scamp in probably 1981, and they had over 50% of the tread still on them. Those were my first radial tires, and they completely transformed the car’s ride. It is probably getting tough to find new whitewalls in a size used by your old cars, at least through normal channels.

      That would be an interesting idea – a service for random people who would agree to meet. It seems like so many of the institutions that used to perform that function (churches and clubs) have become less and less attended. Almost everyone I have ever gotten to know has a really interesting story to tell.

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  4. The line about “music calms the savage beast” is actually from the 1950 Bugs Bunny cartoon “Hurdy-Gurdy Hare” that involves Bugs being terrorized by a gorilla up until he figures out that “They say, music calms the savage beast!”. Mayhem ensues. It’s a testament to the power of cartoons that most of us actually do believe that beast, and not breast, is the actual quote.

    I too love my tire store, I think for exactly the reasons you write about…although I’ve never articulated it as you have. I go to a tiny shop that’s been in business…in the same location, run by the same family….since 1928. I’m pretty sure that some of the tools being used are original to the store. At least it looks that way to me. I’ve wound up there after formerly doing the Tire Rack thing for a number of years, but ultimately I found that my 1928 store would usually match prices with mail order and in the end the price to mount and balance the tires I buy mail order totals out to be nearly the same price as what the store would costs. At least that’s how it works out for me. Plus, the store sells the fancy “tyres” from Finland that are my current favorites (at least 3 seasons out of the year) and that I can’t buy from Tire Rack for some reason.

    Oh, and just curious…was the failed tire pressure monitoring sensor on the tire that seemed to have developed the leak? I’ve more than once encountered those things failing due only to a little rubber washer on the special valve stem that goes south. Of course, you have to dismount the whole tire to figure that out, and then once you do that, you might as well buy tires half the time. Yet another joy of modern technology.

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    • I wish I had a local century-old tire store, but I don’t. So I do the opposite, go to a regional chain that offers a good combination of price and service, and which has enough locations that I can go to one for my free replacement tire if I have a bad tire day when I am out of town.

      I tried Costco a year or so ago on a previous vehicle, but got disillusioned when they broke off a wheel stud and blamed it on the condition of my wheels and lug nuts. Funny, my local shop that had rotated the tires about 3 months earlier had said nothing about those terribly rusted lug nuts, but what do they know? Anyway, that was enough of Costco tire service for me.

      I am actually not sure which wheel the bad senser was on, but the old senser would not crack loose from the old valve stem. My fast leak tire could have been caused by a hard pothole hit a few weeks ago, but the slow leaker could have been anything. The prior owner told me it had been diagnosed as a poor rim seal, but that might or might not be true. I am hoping now that it is not. I just know that I am going to enjoy the luxury of not checking tire pressure and firing up my compressor every morning before leaving for work!

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      • Heres a point: “poor rim seal”. I never had any problems with this until I went to a national tire chain in Indianapolis. I was happy with the service and price, but they used a grinder to “prep” the wheel seal. No one had even done that to any rims I ever had in the previous 40 years of driving. I just shrugged: what did I know. From that point on, the inside of the rims would rust all the time, and break the seal of the tire on the rim, causing a slow leak that I had to fill up every day. I took my car to a local small shop, I had moved to a different state by then, and they resealed the tire/wheels, at a cost of almost what it would have cost to just buy new tires with mounting and balance included in. The only way to stop this madness was to buy new rims all around, a ridiculous cost and one of the things that made the car a trade-in candidate for something new. The moral of the story? That grinding of the wheel around the tire seal seems like a bogus “service”, and you should stop anyone from doing that to your car when you get tires. After all, I went more than 40 years not having anyone do that and never having any problems!

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  5. Timely article, as is often the case. I bought tires for the old Ford van last week. Did you know P235/75R15 tires are quite hard to find?

    The store i used is locally owned and just outside of town. Had what i needed for $200 less than somebody closer. Likely due to cheaper overhead. Tires were part of the business as its technically a mechanic shop.

    Dealt directly with the owner. His wife normally takes calls but she was off that day. While there his father and grandson stopped by. Also a guy who received a “driving award” was looking for someone to vouch for condition of his previously damaged pickup to the award giver wearing the badge. And two rollbacks stopped by to drop cars off. And the Snap On salesman wanted his undivided attention – and did not get it.

    The owner was a great guy who apologized about the Monday morning “sh— show”. While its likely a one time deal, this was the most entertaining trip ive had to a tire shop.

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    • I miss places like this, they all seem to have gone away in my area.

      Tires for the Honda Fit were always a hard size to find, and the selection kept dwindling as the car aged.

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      • The weird thing about the Honda Fit, is that I’m absolutely sure the Fit is smaller than any of my Tercels (we have a couple in my apartment parking lot, and I’m always “sizing them up”), and all my Tercels had 13 inch tires, vs. 15 inch for the Fit? Makes you wonder why? I certainly don’t think they handle any better?

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      • Oh, I think it did. My Fit was the sport model with a relatively wide, low profile tire on the 15 inch rim. Its handling prowess surprised a lot of people.

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    • I have the same problem, but they are mounted to a second set of wheels for a Miata I used to own. A tire store should take them, but they will probably charge us both a recycling fee.

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  7. I have had to replace two sets of tire pressure monitors on my car to date, the last, a full set last year. I bought one of those tire pressure machines but have not used it yet. I read the instructions and I know my 80+-year-old former coworker/friend uses such a machine on her two vans and I am told by her they are “idiot-proof” and you cannot inflate too much air and blow up the tire, but still I am reluctant to try it out. This year I have traveled less miles in my car, than in recent years thanks to the Winter and Summer weather – ugh to both seasons’ weather. Today I had the dubious distinction of rolling over to the 14,000-mile mark. My car will be 16 years old next month … yes, it has the original tires. 🙂

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    • I hate to say it, but at 16 years, you may be due for new tires even though you undoubtedly have gobs of tread life left. And how odd for all those sensors to fail. That will be the Achilles heel of all modern cars as they get old.

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      • I went to Belle Tire because the tire sensor message came on and all four sensors had been replaced in 2020 by my regular mechanic. I remember that it was a few days before the COVID pandemic was declared – good timing. The Belle Tire service desk person said both front tire sensors were gone and I told him to replace the back two also. He said “don’t do it ’til you need them!” I was being proactive and a couple of weeks later, one of the rear sensors went, necessitating another trip and both were replaced.

        I would think since the car sits so much that tire rot might be a problem. My oil change place does check them when I go in once a year, but perhaps I should be more diligent and ask the honest family-owned tire store near me what THEY think. Everyone recommends them over big tire chain stores, but they had to order the tire sensors and it would take a week, so I went with Belle Tire.

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      • The local place sounds like a great option. I use one of those for general mechanical work, and when you find one that does a good job for a fair price and treats you right, it’s a blessing.

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      • My general mechanic that I’ve had since the Regal is now so busy since more people are keeping their cars, when I drive by their place, cars are now parked on the sidewalk in addition to on the busy street out front as they await “processing”.

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  8. I am not a fan of buying tires, for sure but thankfully these last few years I have been blessed with the ability to do it when the need arises. Tire shops, mechanic shops, oil change places, et al. are interesting indeed. I like to listen to the employees talk and I, too, people watch. I’m like you and don’t really go out of my way to meet people but they are interesting.

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  9. Tire shops annoy me, and I never found one that I consistently like.  Some have done shoddy installations, some are a hassle to deal with, and others try to upsell you on a whole bunch of needles repairs.  (One tire shop tried to sell me on a timing belt replacement, even though the timing belt on the car was virtually new.)

    Last year, I tried a different approach.  I bought my tires through an online retailer (as I usually do), but instead of having them drop-shipped to an installer, I opted for “mobile installation.”  That meant an installer would drive to wherever I am, and install the tires on the car.  It cost more, but I figured I’d give it a try since it would mean I wouldn’t have bother with tire stores.

    It went smoothly – the installer was knowledgeable and professional.  He got the installation done in under an hour at my office’s parking lot.  Not a bad way to go, though if I knew of a tire shop that I liked doing business with, I’d probably get the installation done there and save some money.

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    • There is a lot to say for having them come to you. I wonder how they do balancing? If they did an old-school spin-it-on-the- car method, I would be excited. I am still not sold on “computer balancing” that gives a tire a couple of low rpm spins.

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  10. I got four new tires the first December of the Covid pandemic, during lockdown, as my regular mechanic had recommended it was time, and I was the ONLY person in the waiting room, which I appreciated. I think I might have been the only person in the whole Canadian Tire store which sells everything under the sun, like Home Depot/Lowes. I’m sure this set will last for the remaining life of my old Honda. And I do remember the new tire smell permeating the garage for a few days after.

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  11. My newish set of tires deserves more attention than I give. I always forget about regular rotating/balancing and then when I do, it’s a spur of the moment stop-in instead of an appointment. That puts me at the back of the line. So I do what you do – bring the laptop and get things done. I like your approach of an instant blog post from simply observing the characters around you. Waiting rooms are really good environments for laptop work. My current favorite is the dealership where I take my car for service. They have several glass-walled offices for people like me who want a little privacy. They also have decent coffee and little snacks. It’s part of the reason the price I pay for the service is higher than I’d like it to be.

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