Did my wheels get stolen?

Why would you leave your wheels at the shop? First thing I would’ve asked, why aren’t my wheels in my truck?

They are gone, not to be harsh but you let it go way too far.

 

Dang unfortunately you gotta ask for your own personal property these days or some one will think oh well out of site out of mind. So sell them or take them even though they are owned by someone else

 

Just for clarification, OP stated he called a few weeks after the job, and has had failed attempts to resolve for the months that followed. So OP didn't wait for multiple months to try and get his wheels back. He waited a few months before he felt agitated enough to post about it. Your point still stands.

 

Let's just say you go to a shop to have your engine replaced, oil changed or new tires.

Would you look at it the same way if the shop did not assume you wanted to keep your old engine?
How about your old tires?
How about your used oil and filter?

It's all your personal property. You can't just assume the shop knows you want to keep something. If it's that big of a deal, you should specify or at the very least, bring it up before you leave the shop.

 

Wheels aren't exactly a maintenance type of item. If you're having oil changed, its because the old is of no value anymore. Wheels aren't in that category. A more fair comparison would be:
you go to an audio shop to have a new radio head unit installed. They're (probably) gonna leave the old one in your passenger seat for you, unless you specified you didn't want it. At the end of the day, your point still stands; it should've been addressed before OP left the shop.

 

The thing is Why did you leave with out the wheels ?? Then wait months to go looking.

Some shops have so much volume 2 days later no clue where those wheels came from .

Most likely the shop has no idea who you are or what your talking about.

This lesson is on you.

 

The big key to it is that items left behind at a business after the work is complete is considered to be abandoned property - it's no longer yours to bitch about.

Its similar to a buddy that stored some crap in your garage and forgot about it - there comes a legal tipping point where your costs of storage offset the value of the crap, and it becomes reasonable to sell to recover that cost. Or at least that's what Judge Judy said last night.

 

I am afraid you are out of luck...Not logical to expect them wot hold them for a couple of weeks...

 

LOL wtf.... you have a truck with a bed. why on earth did you not take the wheels with you when you picked up the truck? Never go back to that shop and blast them on yelp / google.

 

I think there's 2 takeaways from this thread:

1. We don't know if there was intent or not, but the shop chose to hang on to the customer's wheels, and didn't make an attempt to ask the customer at any point in the transaction or after (if it was an honest mistake) if the customer wanted them back. Its not a good look for the shop, and although they're not ultimately to blame, I wouldn't recommend them to anyone (when there are shops out there that would go out of their way to clarify something like that every single time).

2. All responsibility ultimately falls on OP. OP also made no attempt to clarify, until weeks later. Call it young and dumb, an honest oversight, or whatever; its a lesson learned at the end of the day.

 

Just take the store credit, make sure it doesn’t has an expiry date or any stipulations.

 

Or a partial refund.

 

"The voice-mail box you have called is full and cannot accept more messages, goodbye"

 

Did you expect that they would just store them for you? C'mon man......

 

Sometimes customers will drag ass coming in to pay and pick up vehicles after the repair is done. They sit on the lot taking up space. They don't answer the phone, straight to voice-mail.. I'll leave a message saying "If we don't hear from you, starting tomorrow this vehicle will begin to incur storage fees up to $150 a day"

Like magic, all of a sudden, the phone will ring..

Another trick, when they really start blowing us off, is to move their vehicle to one of our other locations across town. The phone rings.. "hey, I drove by your lot and saw that my car was gone! What did you guys do with it?"

"Oh hello there, look who's phone suddenly started working.."

 

How did you get home and not notice you didn’t have the wheels? What about the next day? Were you ever planning on taking them out of your truck and storing them in a garage, shed, etc? It sounds to me like you didn’t want the old wheels at the time and now weeks later have changed your mind and want them back.

 

waiting a few months was the problem. Some peeps up here in the big cities pay shops $200 to store their summer tires for a few months during snow season.

 

Sounds like he planned on storing them at the shop and then going back when it was convenient for him

 

Its a classic case of post missing important details, thread didn't go as expected, and OP never reports back. It was fun as always.

 

Absolutely I get it, the used oil & filter is a bit extreme of an example lol. Just playing devil's advocate - it's not entirely true about used oil having no value. What if I have a waste oil burning furnace to generate heat? What if I own a oil recycling business? In those cases, used oil would have great value.

I know 2 guys that started a business by taking old, worn out, trashed tires that they procured for free (because they have virtually no value to 99.99% of people, right?) and processing them into various sellable products.

If something doesn't have value to you, it doesn't mean it has no value anymore.

One man's trash...