This may be a silly point, and might get moved to off topic, but then again...

I just made an observation after sitting in a Subaru dealership for four hours waiting for my woman's Outback to have it's 30,000 mile service (for a frigging $418 but that's another post!).

The Subaru dealership waiting area had a coffee/hot chocolate machine (free) for customer use and a bowl of stale munchkins with ants crawling on them.

My Acura dealership has the same coffee machine, no food.

My Honda dealership, however, had a mini fridge with various bottles of appealing drinks (V-8, orange juice, etc.), the same coffee machine, and various tasty donuts and pastries all individually wrapped for freshness. All for no charge, for service customers to partake of while waiting for their cars to be done.

Just another reason to like Hondas, anyone else's Honda dealership sound similar?

 

I wished...the one here has a couple of end tables with old wrinkled magazines on them.

 

Braman Honda in Miami had food, drinks, and computers with internet connections... which I used while I waited to post FLAMES about the dealership for trying to rip me off!

Tried to charge me $380 for an upper radiator hose, thermostat, and coolant... now I know how they pay for those computers! I caught them in lies and just plain overcharging and got the price down to $180, then after they returned the car to me without bleeding the cooling system, I got all of my money back and wrote my rants to Honda-Acura (the board dujour then) while I waited for them to FINISH fixing it.

You get what you pay for, I guess. I'll take the crumpled, 1998 issue magazines and honest, fairly priced service.

 

I guess Sondra you've proved there's no correlation between quality of the customer area and quality of service...

I must say however I was quite impressed with my Honda service, it was only the first oil change but I was able to watch the tech from the waiting room and verify that he did everything correctly. And the charge was only $20, though other battles may be down the road-

Now if I could only find a Subaru dealership that wasn't trying to soak me- $150 just to top off the refrigerant in the A/C! What a scam! Aargh!

 

I hear you on those Subaru Dealerships. A month or so ago I had the Check Engine light go off on my RS, I checked everything out and nothing sounded or looked wrong so I continued to drive it for another week until it was convienient to bring it in. I finally brought the car in (BTW I had called the dealership earlier to confirm that this was all Warranty work, this will make sense later) and after they check the computer for codes they come out and tell me my Mass Air Flow sensor is bad and that its going to cost me 309$ for a new one. First of all I knew that really wasn't what was wrong because I know that once the MAF goes bad the car goes into a limp home mode where power is greatly reduced and the car runs rather rough(I had been driving the car for a week with the light on and it ran like a champ the whole time). Secondly I was pissed because they were going to charge me for what I thought was warranty work. I ended up telling them to screw themselves and ordered the part off the internet for 235$ and installed it myself. Hope you have better luck than I have had.