The News4 I-Team was the first to take you “Under the Hood,” inside AAMCO repair shops, over the summer. exposed questionable work, dozens of complaints and even shop owners who said, they, too, were misled by the company.
Now some franchise owners are taking action, revealing the world of auto repair that, they say, customers don’t get to see.
After retiring from a 30-year career, Tom Furlong spent hundreds of thousands of his own money to open up an AAMCO franchise shop in Elkton, Md. He had no experience in auto repair. But he said AAMCO wanted him to invest, promising to provide all the training and support he would need to succeed.
“‘We’ll be with you every step of the way.’ And that to this day haunts me,” Furlong told the News4 I-Team.
Furlong said training consisted mainly of memorizing a telephone script to use with customers. It’s the same line-by-line dialogue first obtained by the News4 I-Team in August from other shop owners who said its main goal was to separate customers from their cars and convince them to let AAMCO work on their transmission. “I never wasted five weeks of my time more than I did in that training,” said Furlong.
AAMCO told the News4 I-Team it “has a robust franchisee initial training program that has been developed and refined over 50 years. We believe that our training program is superior to that of any other franchise system in the automotive repair market.”
But Furlong said the script didn’t work. Two years later he said he was forced to close after he struggled to pay AAMCO’s 7.5 percent royalties and a weekly $845 advertising fee. According to Furlong, “Support is next to nothing.”
Instead of helping him turn things around, Furlong said, AAMCO threatened him with legal action if he closed. But he said the company offered to take control of the business and “resell his franchise to another investor.” In all, Furlong said, “I would say I lost probably $520,000.”
Furlong is just one of several former and current AAMCO shop owners named in a new class action lawsuit against the company. The lawsuit claims AAMCO “fraudulently induced” the shop owners.