MSD

"I don't give a fuck, it's not my car." This is the motto of the fast auto service industry. If it's inconvenient for the tech and the manager isn't around, or for whatever reason something gets screwed up because of negligence, ignorance, or something else, these are the next words you hear.

Clip broke off the air filter box and now it's sucking air in past the filter? "I don't give a fuck, it's not my car."
Didn't look at the door sticker and put 45psi in tires with a maximum safe inflation of 44psi instead of the manufacturer's reccomendation of 32? "I don't give a fuck, it's not my car."
Put regular oil in instead of the synthetic oil the customer paid an extra $30 for? They'll never notice, and "I dont' give a fuck, ti's not my car."

Company policy is that you never put less than 30psi in tires, even if the manufacturer reccommends 26 or 28. Company policy can't be wrong, can it?

My manager was the cheapest, stingiest mofo you'll ever meet. In the winter, he'd yell at us for using too much hot water, and year round it was a holy war on paper towel usage. "Ian, why are you washing your hands so many times?" "Well, there's that warning on the back of the oil bottle that says prolonged contact with used oil can cause skin cancer, and you refuse to buy enough gloves to cover us until the next order, is that good enough for you?"
The T-Tech machine, featured in the Jiffy Lube video above, is a great thing. you don't have to drain anything, you just have to disconnect a cooling line and hook the machine up to the two ends. The T-Tech manual says to run it until the new and old fluid lines are the same color, indicating that all fluid has been replaced. The original policy was to run it up to halfway for a 4-cylinder car, 3/4 for a 6, and all the way for an 8. Don't pay attention to the fact that treansmision capacity and the number of cylinders have nothing to do with each other, that was company policy. Once we measured an marked off the fluid tank by quarts, the policy became running it to double the transmission pan capacity. In a lot of cars and trucks, that wasn't the total capacity of the system, so not all of the fluid was replaced. If we ran it to the number the policy specified and it wasn't completely clean, our manager had the nerve to ask the customer if he wanted us to run it longer for more money ($10-$30, depending on how dirty the fluid was and our ticket average was that day.) The customer was paying $100 for a service (125 for mercon V, which didn't matter since any friction modified fluid like Honda, Mopar, Mercon V, Toyota, etc. was replaced with Mercon/Dexron III and a botle of Shift Rite Platinum, which allegedly converted it to a friction-modified fluid,) and the manager had to save us $0.50 per quart on transmission fluid to wring the pennies out of everything we did.

They once ran a car for half an hour with no oil because we were running a T-Tech and everyone thought that someone else had put oil in and nobody had checked the dipstick or noticed that the oil cap was still off. I'm glad I didn't go anywhere near that car. Nobody ever told the customer.

I once ran a Jeep into an outside wall by stepping on the clutch from outside of the car and turning the key, then letting the clutch go and assuming that it was out of gear with the parking brake on. We wiped the paint scuff off the bumper and he never knew.
Watch them do it, ask to see a sample of the fluid both before and after the service, and make sure they're actually taking it from your car. If they have fluid samply cards, ask for a drop from your dipstick before and after (check to see that the fluid bleeds into the paper differently and that there's no ring of debris in the center afterward,) Ask them to explain how the service works (vacuum coolant flushes only replace 80% on a single-pass) and watch to see that the tech follows the procedure that was described to you by the service writer.
An honest service writer should show you a part or a fluid sample if they tell you to replace it. An air filter is still good if it's dry and you can see light through the ridges at the peak of each fold (ask to see a new filter and compare, if less than 50% of light is getting through, it should be replaced.) It's easy to sell air filters because of the misconception that dirty=needs repalcement. If the dust on it doesn't reach teh bottom of the folds and it's not oily or plugged up, it's still OK (if the dust is obviously clogging it, then replace it.) As for some other little-known facts that can lead to unnecessary fluid exchanges or feelings of false security, Ford power steering fluid will always look really dark, Toyota OEM transmission fluid has purple dye in it and will look dirty, and Honda fluids other than oil almost never look dirty.

If you want to know the service interval on a particular fluid, give me the year/make/model and the color of the fluid and I'll probably be able to tell you what you need done (this goes for anyone.)