Arnold Clark Sucks

READ HERE WHAT SOME PEOPLE HAVE TO SAY

www.arnoldsucks.com

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Just discovered your site, and not before time.  As an ex-customer, and ex-employee I have plenty to say about this company.

As a customer first of all – I have unfortunately owned two cars bought from Arnolds.  The first was a Corsa that I bought a couple of years prior to working for them.  It was an ex-motability car and upon collection and later inspection by myself it had the following faults – 2 nails in tyres, battery not secured to tray in any way, fan missing 2 fixing bolts so was flapping around loose at back of radiator, handbrake not holding properly, and worst of all wafer thin brake pads!  Disgraceful on a 2 yr old car.  Rather than let Arnolds muck up even more, I fixed the problems myself for £30, but it left a bitter taste in my mouth – paying dealer prices, but receiving auction standards of preparation i.e. none!

I bought the second pre-reg with delivery miles.  It was bought as a stop-gap car while I was between jobs.  It was a ‘new’ car, and although I can’t blame the cheap build quality on Arnolds, I can say that the 3 problems I encountered  in my 15 months of ownership should have only required 3 trips to the garage to sort.  In actual fact, this car made numerous trips to the garage in the time that I had it basically because the mechanics were so incompetent that they buggered up more that they managed to fix.  You probably think why did I buy a second car from them after the Corsa?  I mistakenly thought that buying a delivery miles pre-reg car would be hassle free.  I didn’t reckon on the incompetents that I would be dealing with though (and I’m still waiting on my free mats and fuel)!

Now the good bit!  I worked as a ‘Graduate Trainee Sales Manager’ (ha ha) for Arnolds for a few months.  I’m not giving away any more details than that, but my comments below are truthful, and I can back them up with dates, staff names, customer names, vehicle details etc, so even if anyone from Arnold’s does recognise who I am, I have covered my back.  Plus they’d have to chase me to Cyprus anyway!  First off, the reason that Arnold Clarks never really receive any bad press coverage is due to their massive advertising expenditure with all the major Scottish media companies – the media are hardly going to bite the hand that feeds them are they, so it is down to web-sites like this to tell it like it is.  Secondly, not everything about the company is bad – their prices on new and pre-registered cars are often as competitive as most of the larger companies in England – unfortunately, that is as far as the compliments go.  During my time working for the company, I saw on a daily basis just how their ‘money-grabbing’ mentality works.  Customers are the ‘cash-cow’, and once they have your money, anything else is an annoyance to them.  One of my main duties at Arnolds was to purchase used stock – often this came direct from their hire fleets and was extremely poor quality.  Major rental operators such as Hertz and Avis have properly maintained vehicles, and any accident damage is properly repaired.  Many of the cars that I bought ex-rental from Arnold’s hire division had been accident damaged and poorly repaired – I remember that when the residual values on Ford Ka’s took a sudden drop, I was asked to purchase 10 for my branch.  Having sourced the vehicles, I went out to inspect and then purchase them.  The condition of 9 out the 10 was very poor with numerous defects, and when I phoned the branch manager to inform him that if I were a customer, I would not touch them with a barge-pole, his reply was to ask if they could be cleaned up to look presentable.  They could have been but no amount of tyre paint or polish is going to fix a bent chassis.  I said they could, so was instructed to buy them anyway.  Job done, and when the aforementioned manager received a complaint from a woman that her Ka was pulling badly to the left and that her mechanic that informed her that it had been accident damaged and had a bent chassis, he came back to me to ask why I had bought it – that’s the kind of pass-the-buck mentality you are dealing with.  Salesmen (not all, but 95% - no joke) were slimy spivs who used to talk about ‘raping’ the customer on a finance deal.  I remember one incident when a young lad was purchasing a £6k car.  OK, he should have done his homework and was an idiot for not doing so, but the salesman spun the lad a line to confuse him about flat-rate and APR, so the guy ended up buying the £6k car at 13.8% flat-rate over 5 years!  The salesman was laughing about how the commission had made his day, how he had raped the customer, how he knew what a tight budget the customer was on, and how the lad’s mother who was guarantor would have to sell her possessions when the inevitable happened and her son couldn’t meet the repayments.  If one salesman fell out with another, the spurned salesman would scratch down the side of a car that the other salesman had sold just prior to the customer collecting their new car.  I can also confirm the other contributor’s comments about the ’41-point service’ – it’s basically an oil and filter change, a squirt of oil on the battery terminals and door hinges, and a cursory glance at the other fluid levels.  This applies to the servicing and also to the pre-delivery inspections of sold cars.  Salesmen, managers and mechanics regularly abused customers and stocked cars, wheel-spinning them, revving them until the limiter cut in, handbrake turns in the yard etc.  Younger sales trainees often bumped cars in the yard resulting in broken lights, bumpers, dented panels etc.  17 & 18 year old sales trainees got company cars – usually ex-rental or 2-5 yr old stocked cars.  They would regularly come in to work with stories about how they had been ‘rallying’ the car down the track near the football pitch (or whatever) the previous night and hit a rock or something and “the suspensions gone all funny now.  It keeps pulling to the right”.  (One example of many).  Customers are also told that all cars undergo a full PDi (not), and that all cars are checked on the HPi register and the VMC mileage check register.  It is true that the HPi and VMC checks are done, but I have seen cars come back with discrepancies in mileage etc.  The salesman has then chucked the certificate into the bin and informed the customer that everything has checked out and is fine – the customer very rarely knows that they should be receiving a certificate to confirm this.  In addition to this, as Arnold’s damaged rentals are repaired in-house, details of their accidents never appear on the HPi register.  Don’t purchase breakdown cover from Arnolds – I broke down in a company car on the M8 one day, and the recovery guy ‘fortunately’ only took two hours to get me.  He said that Arnolds only have 2 recovery trucks to cover the whole of Scotland, and it was the other guy’s day off – he was the only one covering Scotland.  When I asked what would have happened if he had been on a breakdown in Aberdeen, i.e. would Arnolds have arranged with a local garage to come and get me, he laughed and said no chance – that might cost Arnold, and that he would have got me….probably about midnight!!!  All of the above accounts are representative of the day-to-day running of Arnold Clarks, and are not just one-offs or isolated cases.

I clocked the company for what it was within a week of joining, but I must have been a bit slow, as my graduate successor clocked it on his first day – I doubt he stayed long either as despite me trying to give him as positive a view of the company as I could, he commented to me after about 2 hours that he would be off when a better job came along.  I had stayed there for a few months, but only until a ‘proper’ job came along.  I had to give my successor a positive view of the company as the Manager threatened to give me a poor/no reference for my next job – he never gave me one anyway because he was (A) too lazy, and (B) didn’t have the intelligence to construct a concise, articulate, and grammatically correct letter anyway.  To summarise, Arnold Clarks have the slimiest, thickest, most unprofessional salesmen and managers that I have ever had the misfortune to work with, the most incompetent mechanics (and I use the term mechanics loosely) I have ever encountered, and as an employee, it was a real eye-opener that a company could be this poor and get away with it.  Arnolds was a poor job for gofers and losers that weren’t capable of doing anything better.  

Advice for potential customers:

Buy a car from the auctions instead – it will be cheaper, if you buy direct from the leasing companies it will probably be a better car, and the standard of preparation will be at least equal (i.e. none) and often better than at Arnolds (i.e. the auction will have valeted it).

Arrange your finance prior to purchasing – shop around the high street lenders for the best deal.

Find another good garage (dealer or independent) to service and repair your car, and stick with them.  Even better, buy a Haynes workshop manual and service and repair your own car – it will be way cheaper, and even if you don’t have a clue what you’re doing, you’ll still end up with a higher standard of work than you would get at Arnolds.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and remember, ‘Promises Delivered’ – I promise never to deal with Arnold Clarks again! 8.8.2003