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I’ve never wanted car payments, and I’m not a car buff, so I’ve always paid cash for good used cars. When the CarMax sales model emerged, it was for me – a fair, no haggle price, and a solid offer for my trade-in. I’ve been a happy CarMax customer through four cars, but the fifth was not the charm.

Briefly – I bought a car recently at the CarMax in Merriam, KS, for my wife. It had a 30 day warranty, and within the warranty period, my wife brought the car into CarMax with hesitation problems, but she was told after leaving it for a day that everything checks out fine. Soon after, just after the warranty expires, the car stops dead on the interstate (see my earlier blog, “Riding with the Road Vulture”). My wife, son and I are stranded on a Sunday in Indiana, 500 miles from home, and I finally drive the repaired car home three days later on the 4th of July.

I called CarMax while I was cooling my jets in Chesterton, IN, waiting for the repair, and I get the contacts to relay my situation. No sooner do I get home when the car dies again. At this point I’ve called the service manager, and I immediately get the CarMax experience I’ve always known. I’m told to provide them with the invoices from the saga in Indiana, and I’m assured that the car will be towed right away to be looked at, and (most importantly), that the file clearly showed the car had been looked at by them for hesitation, and they didn’t want customers having these kinds of major issues right after buying a car from them. I started telling friends, as I have for years, that CarMax is a good company with which to do business.

Apparently, however, the CarMax ideal doesn’t reside in the senior levels of the Merriam location. The poor service manager, who had clearly been taken to the woodshed after assuring me that they needed to take responsibility for our dilemma, informed me out of the blue today that CarMax held no responsibility for our car. Period. Translation – we only take care of loyal customers here in Merriam as long as it doesn’t get too expensive.

Such is life. There will be no tears from me, no lost temper, and certainly no lost sleep. Just well-placed phone calls with the right people that can help me expose the shabby treatment I’ve received at the hands of a CarMax location that put this month’s P&L statement ahead of doing what’s right.

This entry was posted on July 18, 2012 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Family, Travel with tags CarMax, Merriam Kansas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.