Thanks, Caribbean Tire!

We had another “only in Belize” experience recently with the Caribbean Tire store in Spanish Lookout. A few months ago, we had a lot of work done on Tinkerbell. She needed a new starter, and because the old starter had drained the batteries, Tom had to buy two new batteries. We were very busy with guests over the holidays, so Tinkerbell just sat. Last week, Tom wanted to move something big, so he went out to start her up, and absolutely nothing happened when he turned the key. Tom was kicking himself, thinking the starter was bad again just after we had all that work done, but he decided to check the batteries with our computerized battery charger, just to see if that was the problem. When he tried to charge them, the computerized charger kept giving him an error, saying the batteries were no good.


Tom took the batteries out of the truck and headed for Caribbean Tire, where he’d purchased the batteries. The guy at Caribbean Tire took the batteries to run his own tests on them, and came to the same conclusion as Tom – the batteries were bad, after only about three months of infrequent use. The batteries are warrantied for a year, so he prorated the cost of new batteries with three months removed, and started helping Tom purchase the new batteries. During this procedure, Tom mentioned that they were for a diesel Ford F-250, and the guy stopped and asked Tom why he’d purchased these batteries for that truck. Tom told him that the sales attendant at the store had told him that these were the batteries he needed for that vehicle. The guy working with Tom told him that the batteries he’d purchased were too small, and he should have purchased some bigger – and less expensive – batteries, but at least they now knew why the two batteries had gone bad.

So, they had a meeting of the minds to decide what to do – and the Caribbean Tire guy decided that it wasn’t Tom’s fault he’d purchased the wrong batteries and ruined them. He ended up giving Tom two new proper batteries for $30BZ – or $7.50US per battery! You can’t beat that for customer service, so thanks, Caribbean Tire!