What Tire stores do you recommend?

Tire Rack.

Although I was able to get the local Goodyear dealer to come close enough to their price.

 

I've never been to a store that I really would recommend against (maybe I'm lucky:noidea. I've used Just tires, Discount (now American), Sam's Club... Just Tires, and America's Tires, and the rest all sell name brand tires, and usually a cheap brand or too also.
The best service I've ever gotten was recently at a Goodyear store. A curb jumped up right in front of me and took out a front tire on my wife's Prius. I put the little donut spare on, no problem. The next day I went to one store and they didn't have the standard integritys in stock. I didn't want to mix tires on one axle, or buy more than 1 tire so I went to a Goodyear store. I pulled up in front of the service door, and a guy was right there to ask what I wanted. I told him and went inside to pay. I had to wait while the guy inside finished with the customer before me and then I paid for the tire. By the time I as finished. The first guy was coming in the door to hand me my keys. I went out and the car was done, the spare was stowed, and I was ready to go. :whoo:

 

stay away from JustTires. my 2001 prius tires just wore out after 35k miles. they were new and warrantied to 75k in 2003, but they refuse to prorate the old tires...im supposed to call customer service to complain (ive already been to 2 separate locations). incidentally, JustTires is owned by goodyear so i can see why they are stingy.

Americas (Discount) Tire store previously installed tires on my camry: they always have prorated the tires in the event of premature wear, and if you buy the Road Hazard option for $13 you get a free tire if the tire becomes impossible to repair (like a sidewall puncture) as long as there is some usuable tread (3/32") left on the tire. its that simple: a free tire if the old one is destroyed. (one caveat: you have to rotate your tires every 5k, preferrable with them or somewhere with a paper trial---you have to show them your records). Americas beats JustTires by miles.... (havent tried any others)

 

I use Costco. The only tire store I've been to in 35 years of driving that actually used a torque wrench on the lug nuts.

 

I always ask for them to "hand tighten." They look at me like I'm a dumb female; but they don't use that air power thing which makes the nuts so tight I have NO chance of changing a flat without a tow truck coming in with an air compressor to get the darn things off. Now I know to ask them to use a torque wrench!

I have only ever bought tires through Sears; I like their "flat" coverage. I seem to find every nut, bolt, screw and odd sharp piece of metal dropped by the city busses.

 

And you get free nitrogen! (oh noooooo . . . not this can of worms again.)

+1 for Costco!

 

Consumer Reports consistently recommends Costco for price and service.

 

I used America's Tire store for my BMW's and they were great to deal with!!!

 

I posted a story a while back about how I bought tires for my wife's beetle at Sears. They accidentally sold me Summer tires. I recommend them though because even though we put about 15,000 miles on those summer tires and discovered their mistake about a year later because of a snow storm they completely took care of me and gave me a full refund / credit for a new set of tires. ($540 credit by the way) Its one thing if a business messes up, its another for them to step up and go above and beyond to correct themselves.

 

I use America's Tires. CostCo's perfectly fine, but their selection is a little more limited, I think.

The road hazard warranty runs me $9.50 per tire, and I've used it three times now. Not too bad, though it's only worth it on higher-warranty tires. I bought it for my stock integrities initially, so $40 there and popped one of those, so that was the cost of my tire back. Silly for me to buy it for those, but for the Perelli P3000s I got, at $70 / per, I've popped two of them, and spent $60 total on that hazard warranty (4 original + the two replacements), so that's worked out to be $80 i would've been out otherwise.

I had two of my tires get down to 4/32" today and had them replaced. I got the tires at 45,000 miles and today had 109,000 miles on the car, so they were 80% to the 80,000 mile warranty. They gave me $20 back per tire, which is way more than the 20% left I had on the tires.

The only thing is they can be a little sloppy. I had asked for the 2 to be replaced with Yokohama Avids ($67 per) as opposed to the P3000s again ($88 per). When I got my car, they had a new pair of P3000s. I asked the guy about it and he said "Oh man, they didn't tell you? We didn't have the Avid 15s in stock, so we just put the P3000s on there instead." "Same price?" "Yeah." If I had really cared about getting the Avids instead of the P3000s I would've been upset, but the fact that the P3000s cost more anyway negated me being angry at them.

Once I went in there with a donut on, and they replaced the donut with a new tire. But they left the old busted tire in the trunk. Not sure how the heck that happened, it's not like the donut wheel is even the same size.

But they've always been nice, the price fine, the service quick (too quick maybe). If I were you, I'd go in with a list of tires you're fine with and get them all priced. Sometimes they run specials on one or two tires and you can end up getting a good deal that you wouldn't have otherwise if you hadn't asked.

 

I just bought new tires from Merchan't tires here in Maryland....best prices

 

Ordered mine from Tire Rack and then paid Sears to install them. I came out about $200 cheaper than the dealer and got much better tires.

 

Another vote for Costco! Great prices, great service, great return policy...

 

I ordered my snows on-line balanced and free shipping too from Home - Discount Tire Direct - very fast - no complaints at all - I found them here on Priuschat - total cost for 4 snows (4 snow tires and 4 alloy wheels mounted and balanced - shipped UPS) = under $500!!!! - beat that.

 

I got my new tires and wheels at Discount Tire. They use a torque wrench and have nitrogen too. The service is really what I go there for though.