Are there any car guys working in parts stores anymore???

[sully5]

I guess I've been lucky with NAPA then. I've lived in 9 diferent cities and town in the "South" and have had good NAPA parts guys everywhere I go. But since most are independently operated, I suppose that there are some that are badly managed. There are so few "Mom and Pop" parts store anymore, that I've only dealt with 4-5 of them over the years and my experience has been generally good and they will go a lot further in effort to find you the hard-to-find parts.

Sorry you have nothing but bad ones in your Louisiana town. But in Jax, and Bradenton, FL, Atlanta, GA, Houston, and Arlington, TX, all over Kentucky and in Nashville, TN I have always found good parts clerks but never in the national chains, except for NAPA. So your generalization about the south has not been my experience.

[BigMike]

The Advance Auto up the street has dos bonita senoritas that are very helpful.

[Macon ACE]

The Advance Auto up the street has dos bonita senoritas that are very helpful.

That's too funny. There's one near me that also has a very attractive young lady that's either the mgr or assistant mgr. She seems like she really knows her stuff too. And they also have an old guy there. I thought he'd be the most knowledgeable but he's pretty clueless. The rest are young guys driving rice that don't know blinker fluid from a flux capacitor!

Our local NAPA was good but closed several years ago. The nearest is 30 miles away now.

[DV65CustomCab]

My local NAPA is the only parts store I frequent. I only go to the Zone when it's Sunday and I'm desperate for something. Makes my skin crawl just to pull in the parking lot.

I worked in auto aftermarket and dealer parts for about 15 years. Quite simply, nobody with a brain stays in that line of work for very long because it simply doesn't pay well enough. I loved the parts business, but unless you are a manager at a dealership you're not going to make a decent living at it.

Additionally, Autozone et al have turned auto parts into just another K-Mart style niche store. The basic formula is sell the cheapest crap you can get, and hire teenagers who work for pennies to run the place. It's what the average Joe who buys wiper blades and air fresheners wants, but ruins it for the real gearheads like us. Blissfully, my NAPA is not like that, and the owner and I have a relationship. All the employees dig my weird collection of vehicles. The serious commercial accounts still buy there. Price isn't the deciding factor for most of these guys.