Tirerack Customer Service on the slide?

The last few times I've tried purchasing anything from Tirerack, I've gotten absolutely horrendous customer service. Their website will state a part is in stock and I'll get a follow up e-mail days later saying it's on backorder, yadda yadda yadda, and that's fine. It's that these customer service reps. I have to ellicit any kind of information out of them to come up with a solution and it's like pulling teeth. No alternate solutions of what is in stock, no timeline for backordered items, no redirection to another possible supplier that they might have a huge inventory of, I have to push them to refund the charges, no nothing. 

I'm guessing this is part of the Discount Tire takeover. I'm in no rush for most of the things I order for them, it's just super frustrating when you're trying to sort out a solution to your requirement and there's nothing on the other end that can help. 

It's not just Discount Tire, it's institutional investment and fund managers buying up anything they can squeeze pennies out of.  It's making the entire supply chain into poop. 

AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) said:

It's not just Discount Tire, it's institutional investment and fund managers buying up anything they can squeeze pennies out of.  It's making the entire supply chain into poop. 

Proving that the pandemic was not the end of fragile just-in-time supply chains...because as poopy as they are for customers, they're just too profitable.

I used to give TR a lot of business over the years. About 36 months ago, I had it with them. Tires are much cheaper elsewhere, and the service is better. I buy average of 19 sets of tires a year.  Have never bought from them since. Dont plan to. Take my $ elsewhere. 

AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) said:

It's not just Discount Tire, it's institutional investment and fund managers buying up anything they can squeeze pennies out of.  It's making the entire supply chain into poop. 

Yeah half of the problems described are simply that they don't know when anything will be in stock because it could show up tomorrow or never again. That's not specifically their fault.

Their website has a lot of...interesting limitations that are pretty annoying. In particular it's really not set up to deal with backorders, and somehow they're not working on resolving that despite now 2+ years of constant backorders being normal. But any time I've run into issues the actual customer service has been fine, other than the annoyance that I shouldn't need to talk to them in the first place.

I'm not opposed to shopping elsewhere, but I'd really like to know where people are finding the same tires "much cheaper" elsewhere. Any time I shop around it's all the same prices everywhere.

The first time I ever dealt with them, 33 years ago, I had a technical question and the guy on the phone was a Dick. I knowingly asked a silly question but it's not like this didn't happen everyday......I wrote it off to the guy being miserable. I actually found it amusing.

With that said I've had good dealings with them the few times I have used them over the years.

I've found a local shop that I'm pleased to have around, so I don't really online shop tires anymore, but TR was my go-to for looking things up, and I've ordered a couple sets of wheels and tires from them in the past and it's gone fine. I guess that's been five or six years now in the nearest case, so not current to the Discount takeover.

Given their support of UTCC and other amateur motorsport, unless I have it go badly wrong in future they're still the first place I'll look if my local shop can't get something and I'm doomed to dealing with an online retailer.

In reply to mr2s2000elise :

You buy 19 sets of tires a year?  For your personal cars?  If so, day-umm!

Note that when they went to free shipping, they started prioritizing more local warehouses to keep their costs down. I have access to the wholesale portal that shows stock in each warehouse if anyone gets a "sorry, that part is on backorder" after placing an order. I'd be interested to see if it's on BO nationally or just regionally.

Keith Tanner said:

Note that when they went to free shipping, they started prioritizing more local warehouses to keep their costs down. I have access to the wholesale portal that shows stock in each warehouse if anyone gets a "sorry, that part is on backorder" after placing an order. I'd be interested to see if it's on BO nationally or just regionally.

So they have fixed that part of it, if an item is in stock at any warehouse, it will ship. Now the issue is that if an item is totally out of stock, it locks into shipping from your local warehouse instead of doing something logical like putting all orders into a single "first come first serve" list. So for example most tires arrive through west coast ports and it can take some time for them to filter out to the east coast warehouses. So then all the west coast orders get filled first even if they ordered later, or there's been a lot of situations where existing orders still show backordered but the item is actually in stock just at a different warehouse. That happened to me last year, I ended up cancelling my order and reordering. The new order tires arrived at my door while the old order still showed backordered.

I can tell you that their national inventory is still much better than ATD, US Auto Force or NTW. Tirewire and tirehub are getting some of their product, and product share, but the issues with inventory are due to manufacturers being behind, and not due to internal issues within TireRack. 

Never had a problem with tire rack ever.  I don't wait to the last minute to buy tires.  I will continue to buy tires from them seeing they sponsor the $2000 challenge.  You can't blame a retailer for supply issues.  They want to sell as many tires as they can.  We need to stay loyal to companies and people who support our sport.  

They're still the title sponsor of BMW CCA Club Racing, which is the series is race in. So I'll keep buying all my tires from them unless/until that changes.