ajtj99's Market Pulse

[jdaasoc]

Retailers PBY & BBBY

I know you don't like Pep boys. PBY I brought my car there this spring for tire rotation (just about the only thing I would trust them with).

It seems there is an car insurance fraud ring that targets retailers like Pep boys. The scheme involves intentionally running a junk car with many pre existing dents but with full collision coverage into a customers car driven by a store employee while it is backing up making the store employee look as the at fault driver. The police report after the fact places blame on the $8.00 per hour store employee and the insurance company pays for all unrelated damage on the insured car and retailer like Pep Boys paying off on car damaged by their store employee. It happened to me and it is quite slick. It is hard to get a handle on it since all parties are not on same page and one has to be ready to blow the whistle on car insurance fraud claim quickly.

I got payment for my damages from Pep Boys $1,100 but I may get charged with an fault accident out of it if my insurance company gets a claim from the other cars insurance company for their payout of $4,000 for a lot of unrelated body work not caused in the accident.

RE BBBY

I some dealing with their IT department and I not too enthused with their ability to deal with their problems. It seems they have a Harmon discount beauty aids division with about 40 stores. The only problem is their very old DOS based POS solution will not take credit cards with expiration dates of 2013 or later. They haven't found a way to deal with the OS problems with handling dates beyond 2013. It looks like a very cheap retailer would is way behind the times on technology. I can't imagine that the flagship BBY stores are run this badly but they can't be run much better.