The other day I took my wife's car to get all four tires changed at Discount Tire in Ross Township. Now granted, I got a price that I wasn't sure if it was high or not. At North Hills Toyota earlier. Furthermore, it was one of those strange buy three tires and get the 4th tire free type of deals which always feels like I’m about to be had somehow. Knowing that a Toyota Rav 4 should be able to get away with some decent middle-of-the-road, no pun intended, tires, then I thought I could go to Discount Tire and save a bundle.

Well, I quickly found out when I entered the posh and spacious and exquisitely clean, and the orderly Discount Tire garage and showroom on McKnight Road in Ross Township, that I had mistaken this Discount Tire for the Discount Tire Center in Bellevue over yonder on Ohio River Blvd. The young kind counter mechanic explained that that is a totally different place and they are Discount Tire Center, whereas they were just Discount Tire. 

I should have suspected something was different because the place in Bellevue was kind of an off the Ohio River Blvd grease monkey pit. However, you could get in and out and get some fabulous deals on tires so far as I remember. 

Here the tires were priced about just what I would have got at the North Hills Toyota dealership. However now I was already here and how many trips am I going to devote to getting new tires to save 100 bucks or so? Perhaps in today's day and age, maybe a couple. But jeez, just the gas it would take to make several more trips might make it worth it just to pay whatever and to get the heck out of a garage with new tires and as quick as time possible.

The speed at which they were able to put new tires on the car and look them up and price out several different levels of tires was impressive. I really liked the showroom or waiting room because it was spacious and clean. You could sit there and even watch them work on your car throw a window. I got the sense that everything from customer service through tire rotation was a well-defined process that they had down pat. 

The customer service folks were pleasant enough. My only gripe might be that they try to add on some sort of $20 policy or something where you can, I don't know, you can come back in a year or so if your tires are defective and they will handle it. It just seemed like something that I didn't want to pay for, so I told them to take that off my price. Like any business, they're gonna start you off with the high-end tires. Which could run you quite a bit of money.

They started me out with tires that cost over 200 bucks per tire for a Toyota Rav 4 and I thought that was really high. So, I kept saying, do you have something a bit lower, and the guy kept showing me the tires that went lower in price on his monitor. 

I finally felt that after seeing tires that cost over 200 per tire, well, maybe tires around the 150 a piece price is probably what I'm looking at. When he got to those tires, I said OK, now we're in the ballpark. Nonetheless, I asked him if he had anything cheaper, and then he said, oh yeah, we have the “laughers.” Surely, I don’t want to put the laughers on my car. 

I was too embarrassed to ask to even see the laughers, but something tells me, those tires may not have been that bad either.

This pricing experience has nothing uniquely to do with Discount Tire at all, but I'm wondering if a good tire tip is just to go with something that's going to get you around 40,000 miles per tire. After all, all of the tires that claim that you get 70,000 or 80,000 thousand miles will mean you must spend out the wazoo to get them. I have never, to date, talked to anyone that got the advertised mileage out of a tire that was sold to them on that millage. Heck, it's always your fault if the tires don’t last right? You didn’t put enough air in them or rotate them? Heck, don’t they rotate every day I drive the freaking car? Okay, I am just being silly there. Why not laugh about typical tire sales tactics. It seems better than buying the so-called laughers. 

Case in point, my wife's Toyota Rav 4 has 37,000 miles on it and needed all brand-new tires. And this on a car that barely makes it out of the North Hills. So, I don't know if I get another 40,000 miles out of a set of tires, I guess I'm happy with that. I am wondering if the laughers would have delivered 37,000 miles. If so, then maybe the name is ironic since I would have had the last laugh if my laughers lasted that long. 

I still wonder what I might have paid at Discount Tire Center in Bellevue, but oh well. I'm not going to drive across the north hills to find out. I'm going to save the next 40,000 miles on this Toyota Rav 4's tires for where it will be needed, McKnight Road.

All in all, I recommend Discount Tire if you are looking to get a decent pair of quality tires at a decent price and to get in and out fast. I think Discount Tire did extremely well in that regard and the showroom/waiting room is spiffy and spacious and well-lit; not a bad place to kill some time on your iPhone while your car gets outfitted with new tires.