Michael Recently, Angelika drove home with a nearly flat car tire, which had picked up a nail. Fortunately, our car has a $15 pump from China in the trunk, which I plugged into the cigarette lighter. After making a hellish noise for 10 minutes, it brought the tire back to normal pressure. With that, I drove to the giant supermarket Costco, which, according to the internet, repairs tires purchased from them for free.
In America, it is quite common to patch holes in tires, but the Costco guy found this case too tricky because the nail was only 1 cm away from the edge of the tire. Additionally, the store no longer carried the model purchased a year and a half ago, but the salesperson assured me that I would get my money back if I found the tire model somewhere else and then exchanged the old tire with the nail in it at Costco.
On the internet, I chose the super tire dealer tirerack.com which offered the tire for $59 plus $16 shipping fees. Since "Tire Rack" operates out of the state of Indiana, there was no California sales tax applied. And just two days later, the UPS delivery person dropped the tire off at our apartment door! It wasn't even packaged, just a label with our address was stuck on it. If I worked at UPS, I probably would have rolled it down the hallway to the door from the elevator with a push!
When you order from Tire Rack, you can have the tires delivered directly to one of dozens of local workshops, where they will be professionally installed. However, Costco does not install tires that you haven't purchased there. Following the advice of the Costco employee, I had to go to a mechanic in the Mexican neighborhood of Mission, whose business card he handed me, to have the tire installed for $25. In the suburb of South San Francisco, someone would have done it for $15, but I didn't want to drive that far with the spare tire. Afterwards, I went back to Costco, presented the old tire, and since it had less than 50% tread left, I received a refund of 50% of the original purchase price, which was $55--not bad!
Why you can exchange tires with nails in them wasn't entirely clear to me, but as they say in Bavaria, "he who asks a lot goes astray." The man at the customer service counter asked me what was wrong with the tire, and I replied that there was a nail in it and the tire guys couldn't repair it. Without complaint, he refunded the $55 to my credit card. That's what I call customer service...