Advance Auto Parts reviews

Incompetent Co-Workers hired simply to have warm bodies in the store(s). This is not a blanket statement, I’ve met and worked with some wonderful people who had all the qualities one could desire of a coworker, and employee, but as evident by many reviews, of many of our stores, we hire people who have zero automotive knowledge, and this only leads to frustrations with our customers when they need simple tune-up parts, or a common speciality tool for a repair. Truthfully, we are not paid a mechanics wage, and therefore, generally, will not have anywhere near a mechanics knowledge, but knowing the basic terminology for your common parts on a vehicle is quite essential to the job, and many employees are lacking. Customer Database is not linked between other stores, if the customer does not have their receipt, we are usually unable to help them as we can’t verify purchase date and other essential information. A customer will have one of our AutoCraft batteries in their vehicle, they will tell us the vehicle is having trouble starting, and they believe the culprit is the battery, we proceed to test the battery, and the battery is bad, unfortunately, the customer does not have their receipt, but they mention their name is in the system, we search the system, first by their name, no results, next by phone number, no results, sorry sir/ma’am, I’m unable to find your profile in the system, and without a receipt, I’m unable to enter the required information into the system for the battery warranty, we now have a customer who has one of our batteries, within it’s warranty, but without their purchase information, we either provide false information to our system in order to force it to warranty out the battery, or we notify the customer that we’re unable to honor the warranty without their proof of purchase, their receipt. We’re placed in these situations frequently, and our desire to help the customer is there, but in order to do so, we are forced to violate policy, which places the employee in quite a gray zone. Labor is not proportionately applied to each store, my current store is not allotted a proper amount of labor hours in order to schedule an adequate amount of employees to complete the required tasks, this in turn results in not only the store not being maintained properly, but this directly affects the customers, as we're unable to staff the many registers we have, and our sales floor suffers as no one is able to front face products, replenish products, and keep it clean. Related to my previous ‘con’, the expectations are overly high when also considering the limited staffing we’re allowed. It is understandable to want to have clean floors, and windows, bathrooms that are not repulsive, and a sales floor with products that are professionally displayed, these are mutually desired, but without the proper staffing, these become quite difficult to do in combination with the essential functions of the store.

The purchase of carquest has had its faults especially when customers purchase at (existing converted to advance auto) carquest stores. How Advance hasn't been able to merge Apex and Exploris into one system yet is aggravating at times. Carquest should have not been rebranded but left alone. Consumers stay with what they know regardless of the employees are still there or not. Seems money could've been spent elsewhere than a mass conversion when so many older Advance facilities need revisions and maintenance upgrades. Overtime isn't allowed in all stores. Bonus structure is sometimes tough to achieve.