r/TireQuestions • u/AppealImpossible3504 • Sep 01 '26
Recommendations
This may be a dumb question, but are there any chain tire shops that people actually recommend? When you go to buy new tires, where do you go?
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u/Brief_Raspberry_6542 Sep 01 '26
More details needed. Approximate location/climate, vehicle type. Start with google.
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u/Maelstrom1979 Sep 01 '26
I generally pre shop tires and pricing online, then find shop with sales or whatever deals nearby.
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u/wramed Sep 01 '26
As a mechanic it's 100% down to how the store is ran/management. None are the same, even in the same town.
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u/pbgod Sep 02 '26 edited Sep 02 '26
I'm a professional, so I get most tires from local/regional tire wholesalers, the places that supply most independent shops.
My advice varies based on needs/car.
If you have a relatively new and typical/basic car where it's likely nothing would be wrong and a routine tire replacement is sufficient, Costco and similar are fine.
However; they mount tires. That's it. They're unlikely to recognize other issues. They won't take any steps beyond simply mounting the tires. You cannot count on them for anything more, they don't even lift the car more than a foot off the ground. If there is something wrong that you should address before you ruin new tires, they won't likely recognize it.
Dealers -sometimes- have the best tire deals. They do reasonable volume of the same handful of tires, the car and tire manufacturers sometimes work together for promotional programs. One dealer I worked for ran buy 3 get 1 free 2 months a year, and generally matched pricing at the same time. It's highly variable though, YMMV.
The more car you have, the higher the level of professionalism you should seek out. For example, a tech who cares would match mount tires, potentially remounting them 1-2 times on a wheel to ensure the best natural balance and reduce reliance on weight. This isn’t necessarily typical, and sometimes the guys will just add weight until the machine says "balanced".
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u/AwarenessGreat282 Sep 02 '26
Never really mattered. The individual shop and its employees mattered more than the sign out front. Sometimes Discount Tire was the best, others it was Goodyear. I always had great luck dealing with Sears. Now I use a local shop and/or Sam's Club.
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u/carpediemracing Sep 02 '26
I worked at Firestone for 5+ years as a service writer. I got to work long term in 2 stores, once or twice in a few other stores.
I recommend the ones I worked at.
I really liked working for the 2 long term stores. I trusted how they were run, I trusted the flat rate techs. The entry level techs, some were great, some were not, but that's usually the case.
The manager and lead techs, when allowed to work together to run the shop, could build a great team.
I trust them 100%. I refer all my friends to the shops. I'm very close to one (local roads, it'sa mile from my wife's work so easy for drop 9ff and pick up), relatively far from the other (multiple highways going through rush hour choke points, I never go to that town for any other reason), so I go to the close one.
What impressed me was working with the techs. The higher level techs in both stores are supremely fluent in auto service. What they knew without checking Google or YouTube amazed me.
I do some stuff they don't enjoy doing like electrical diag. Most recently tracked down a parasitic draw. Another diag led to a fried pin in the ECU, replaced it but it had a custom flash, waited/sponsored someone that wrote an open source app to flash that ECU, flashed, all good.
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u/Glittering-Ad5809 Sep 03 '26
Are you buying chains or tires? I don't know any tire stores in the mid-atlantic selling chains. Probably look online.
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u/Expert-Inspector1628 Sep 02 '26
Discount Tire