My wife's car was neglected pretty heavily by the previous owner and her heater recently went out. While replacing the thermostat and topping off the coolant I noticed the coolant system was full of rust so I had called around getting prices for a coolant system flush and Firestone quoted me ~$93 after tax. I set an appointment for 1PM to bring my car in and was told it would be about an hour to an hour and a half to complete the service.
When I arrived, there was some kind of confusion about me leaving the car because it was checked in as a "drop off" and as a result it didn't get started for another hour or so because the technicians that could complete the service were allowed to go to lunch. When the service was completed I was told that the car might need additional flushes to fully clean the system because it was still pretty bad. The store was fairly busy and by that point I had been sitting in the lobby for close to 3 hours so I just paid and took the car home. On the way home I kept getting bursts of power from the engine and upon arriving home I discovered they had completely overfilled the coolant system and coolant was leaking all over the engine bay causing the belts to slip. They weren't kidding either about needing more flushes because it looked exactly the same as before the service.
I ended up doing the flush myself, something I was trying to avoid doing on my day off. Doing it myself I discovered there was likely no way they pulled the drain plug off the bottom of the radiator because undoing all the screws on the plastic shroud covering it, a bunch of grime and dirt came off that would have come off if they had done the same. After draining the system, filling it with water, letting the engine warm up to open the thermostat, then doing a running flush of the system I was able to get the water to run clean. I then drained the whole system, replaced the reservoir, and refilled the system with coolant. By this point the customer service line was closed so I called Firestone's customer service the next day and lodged a complaint about not getting the service that I felt I asked for and the representative said she would contact the store manager and he would have 24 hours to get back to me. 27 hours later I hadn't heard anything so I called back and got another representative who said she didn't see where the first rep actually called the store. So she got me in touch with the service manager and I explained my issue with the poor service I received. He explained that the way they do a flush is with a kit/machine they hook it up to and they wouldn't run it multiple times to get it clean, they would just do it the one time. I retorted that had someone explained that to me I would have never dropped my car off for service because the intention was to clean out the system, not do a useless flush that doesn't fix anything. He did offer for me to come back in and he would "see what he could do". I did end up going back in about a week later and he refunded the full price of the service, so no harm no foul I suppose.
My poor experience with the service itself aside, everyone was kind and friendly and ultimately they did perform the service I paid for but I feel that they could have better communicated the scope of their service better to me, or upon looking at the rusty coolant explain to me that it may take several flushes instead of just doing the flush I asked for and saying essentially "Well we did the flush but it's not clean. You can keep paying us to keep doing it though." read more