Dear O’Reilly Auto Parts Staff:
I am very sorry that I had the audacity to walk into your store and attempt to purchase car cleaning products this evening. I was not aware of your store’s policy requiring all female customers to be accompanied by an adult male.
I appreciate your attempt to handle the situation diplomatically — rather than embarrass me by coming out and explaining that I was not supposed to be in the store without my husband, you simply refused to wait on me, speak to me, or even make eye contact with me the entire time I was there. Especially diplomatic was the way you looked past me to strike up largely pointless conversations with all the men who came into the building, even after I got in line to buy something I needed.
I apologize for attempting to do business with you. It was an honest mistake, and I certainly will not let it happen again.
Emily
P.S.: Your gearshift-knob selection righteously sucks.
Red Fork Hippie 
Oh they can be dolts can’t they. LOL
The pitiful part is that in my experience, the O’Reilly stores are generally of the most assistance of the chains. I have gotten more useful advice and assistance out of them than Napa or Pep Boys or Advance.
I hope this wasn’t the one near Admiral and Sheridan. If it wasn’t, you might give them a try sometime. They have often been of considerable assistance to me.
Makes you wish you were Marissa Tomei for about 60 seconds, doesn’t it? I have always been in awe of her in My Cousin Vinnie.
Seriously, I would send an email to the corporate headquarters because they need to know that they have a renegade store in Tulsa. I have been to a few of the O’Reilly’s in this area and been treated like a customer–not a female customer–just a customer. Your store is an aberration and they need to know about it. A lot of corporations have what is basically a committee on publication that runs a search for their store name daily just to sample the opinions being served up on the internet. You might hear from them whether you initiate it or not, but I would let them know that they are driving away business.
I think it’s possible they were just having too much fun goofing around with their buddies (they obviously knew the guys who had come in) to pay attention to anybody else, but as I was getting in the car, I saw another woman — who’d come in after me — leave without buying anything, either, and they’d ignored her when she came in, too. If it wasn’t deliberate sexism, it was certainly lousy customer service.
Made me wonder if I would have gotten the same response if I’d pulled up in Gretchen. It’s easy to dismiss me as Just-A-Girl when I pull up in a Japanese roller skate. The unmistakable throaty rumble of a 327 tends to command a little more respect. (Our old neighbor was in complete awe of me because I could handle a truck with no power steering and reset a GFI switch; evidently his ex had been a helpless little thing, so he wasn’t sure what to make of me.)
I had a great experience at an O’Reilly store recently when I went in to buy new wiper blades. I won’t go into the details, but I felt very appreciated, the service was fast, and nobody tried to talk down to me or ignore me. I guess it just depends on the day and the mood.
We’ve had good luck with Autozone. I normally go there (and checked there first when I was looking for a gearshift knob), but I wasn’t wild about the options and went to O’Reilly to see if they had anything I liked better. They didn’t, but I was on the way to the car wash to vacuum my car out and would have bought a container of Armor All wet wipes to clean the dash and stuff, but I stood in line for, like, five minutes (after being in the store for at least five or 10 minutes before that without being acknowledged at all) and couldn’t get anybody to ring me up or even say, “We’ll be with you in a moment” or “Thanks for waiting” or anything else, so I finally just put them back and left without buying anything.
The sad thing is that while I am not usually susceptible to suggestive selling, I love buying stuff for my car and probably could have been talked into a few new toys if anyone had bothered to come and ask me if I wanted them. Silly boys….
You’re just as well off without the Armor-all for your dashboard. You’d be a lot better off using Windex on a soft cloth or probably vinegar and water because the Armor-all leaves a shine behind and you do not want a dash to reflect bright sunshine–WAY too much glare to be safe on the road. Even a black dashboard will reflect. Our Civic had been super-detailed by the used car dealer and the first thing I had to do was eliminate that glare. They make those things matte finished for a reason.
I can imagine. If I were less lazy, I would wax my exterior and give my interior a thorough cleaning, but with three dogs and a taste for back roads, that seems like an exercise in futility….