My Emergency brake on my Daily Driver 95 Escort Wagon was not holding the car and needed some adjustment. Car is a 5 Speed, so I need it to warm the car up because my driveway has a very minimal incline. I take the car to Meineke Muffler & Brake Shop to have the adjustment made. The car has over 100K on it, so they said that the cables needed to be replaced. For some reason they said this car uses Three cables. I go to get it fixed, and they said that I need back brake pads or the e brake probably won't work because they are pretty worn. It had been a long time since I replace the back brakes, so I went ahead and got that done too.
Got the car back and it worked for a couple of weeks, and it started to roll back in the driveway again with the e-brake fully on. I took it back to Meineke, and they said that you are not suppoed to use the e-brake to hold a car on a hill. They tried to claim that my driveway was practically a 90 degree angle even though one of the techs drove by my house to look at it and saw that it was not much of a hill. They said that Ford says that you are supposed to use reverse as your e brake, and not use the actual emergency brake to hold the car. They said that by using it to hold the car in the driveway that I am at fault and must have stretched the new cables and ruined, so tough luck. I told them I wanted at least a partial refund because I came to them and paid hard earned money to get a problem fixed and I still have the same problem. They said a big NO on that. They told me that I should take it to Ford (and pay myself) and have them look at it and see if anything was done improperly. They also said that this problem must be a defect on this particular car, and it is not their fault. I e mailed Meineke Corporate, and got a response back that was expected which was NONE. It is not a big enough amount of money to incur the expense of suing over and I can't really take off work to go to small claims court, but the arrogance of this organization aggravating. I won't be going back there again. I guess I should go to the Ford dealer next time I need work done instead of trusting these non customer friendly places to fix my car properly.