Through no wish or desire of my own, I just recently found myself in need of spending money. My car, ahem, my American car developed a new problem last Friday. I’m learning the lesson that just when I think nothing else can go wrong, it is me who is wrong. The new problem is a busted power window switch. The switch broke and therefore the drivers side window won’t go down. It’s a bit of a nuisance since I have to swipe a card to get into my parking garage at work. Anyway, I got the problem fixed today, but I’m wondering if I behaved in the way that best stimulates the economy.
The first option I had was to address the problem immediately head less than a mile from my office to Jkoons Pontiac and let them fix it. However, those guys are ass-ramming uncle fuckers, so I stayed away from them. But I could have probably spent 1/3rd of my tax rebate on this option.
The second option was to wait until Saturday when I was in Charlottesville. There I could contact local dealership, attempt to buy the part, and then proceed to install it myself. I did just that. An early morning phone call went through and I was told that the part had to be ordered and that it would cost approx. $120, or 20% of my rebate.
The third option was to count on ye-olde internet. And I say “ye-olde” because the GM parts subsidiary, AC Delco, is clearly trapped in the year 2001. Their website is nothing short of grotesque horribleness. Not only was the site difficult to navigate and understand, it also did not associate the part I needed with my car. It was only through other websites that I found the proper part number. But that’s ok, too, because the AC Delco site is in such a sad state that it wouldn’t even let me attempt to add things to a cart so that I could be told how much they wanted to charge me. Anyway, I finally found the part listed on Amazon. I ordered it and first-day shipping. All totaled, AC Delco part from Amazon cost about $60, or only 10% of my rebate.
Let me quickly offer GM congratulations for designing a system free of outside middle-men that makes things twice as expensive.
So, through this whole process, I managed to spend the least amount of money. The American assholes at JKoons didn’t get any cents from me. Nor did the undoubtedly useless and brain dead Americans who work at the dealership in Charlottesville. And, to make matters worse, the part I installed was made in Mexico. Clearly, I’m a bad American and bad for the economy.
PS - Not 30 minutes after I ordered the window switch, I noticed that the power lock mechanism in the passenger door quit working.
The Double D Says:
I too have an American made vehicle that costs considerably less to maintain than the wifes VW which continuously costs an easy $600 every time it has a problem. F German engineering, I like the American mentality of “if we put it in there, the owner should be able to take it out and replace it.” To get to my wifes air filter, you actually have to have a ratchet extension to remove a firewall and then disconnect a lot of delicate hoses sitting on top of the manifold. Awesome…..I’ll stick with my tried and true beat the shit out of truck that still runs thank you very much. I am actually going to write GMC and thank them for such a great vehicle and convincing argument for our next family vehicle.
Apparently you missed that I was bashing GM.