In the 1970s, Target Stores had automotive service departments. I was a young college student looking for summer work. I must have looked like a mechanic because they placed me in the service department. I learned to put on new tires, balance them, and occasionally do alignments. Alignments were not my best skill, but I did a few. I could handle tires in a flash. The bulk of our work consisted of LOFs: lube, oil, and filter changes. We ran specials on these and could complete about five an hour on a good day. This became our specialty. We moved away from difficult mechanics because we couldn’t find a traditional mechanic for the salary we were offering. My supervisor was a traditional mechanic but not a very good boss, nor an honest one. The service manager decided it was okay to steal from the company and take things out of the service bay doors to his car. It took some time, but the loss prevention team caught him and let him go. Because of the high turnover in the department, I took on a leadership role despite my limited skill set.
I had the joy of doing the schedule and assigning tasks. We stopped doing a lot of the complicated work because we didn’t have a certified mechanic. We continued with the basics, and I assigned jobs as they came in. There wasn’t much in the way of tipping or customer recognition, so it didn’t really matter who did what job. As luck would have it, a young college student was next in line to do a set of tires. An old Volkswagen Bug came in and needed a complete set of tires. Tony was normally a solid worker with great attention to detail, until this day. He finished the job, completed the ticket, and sent the customer happily on his way.
The customer called us about 45 minutes later from a restaurant at 6th and Wadsworth. This was a major highway through Lakewood and handled thousands of cars daily. He sounded very calm but shared with us that there was a minor problem with the tires. This incident taught me a great deal about the balance point of a Volkswagen. Apparently, the physics of this design allow it to travel on three wheels until it stops. The customer said he was driving on 6th Avenue and was getting off the highway at Wadsworth. He looked to his left and realized that his tire was passing him. He pulled over, and when he stopped, the car sank on the driver’s rear side. His tire traveled another 200 yards before it stopped. He called to ask if we could help because he didn’t have a jack and didn’t have five lug nuts to attach the tire. We drove the five miles and easily put the tire back on. We asked him to return to the store so we could take the tire off and check for damage.
The customer’s car was fine, but we never found the original lug nuts. From that day forward, Tony had to have someone check his work on tires.