BEWARE! Tip Top provided the worst service of any company I've ever dealt with. One of the only times in my life I felt racially discriminated against directly by company owners!
Was tasked to find a car for my household. Went to Tip top May 9, 2022. Test drove a car, drove beautifully. Put a deposit down that day. Salesman says go ahead and start paying for insurance on the new car which we do. Few days later salesman calls and says car is stalling and needs repairs.
Week in I ask for more updates on repairs and more options for in the same price range. Don't feel like I'm getting timely responses, seems like because sale was already made, my family was put on back-burner.
Couple weeks in sales says the owner rather just return the deposit and drop me as a customer. I say 94% of their customers say they go out of their way to set them up with a car, yet I feel like I'm being discriminated against, for whatever reason, skin color or autism. Salesman takes this personal, not professionally. Tells me stuff that is not relevant to the purchase and is designed to have me feel sorry for him instead of focusing on business.
Gets upset and explains to my grandmother he doesn't want to deal with me again. So because I feel discriminated against, they choose to discriminate against me further. Okay.
I'm hands off at this point, don't wish to exacerbate things. My family attempts to resolve this issue. Tip top gave up on helping, advised to contact the repair facility directly. Not until day 75, told the car isn't repairable. Tip top throws repair facility under the bus for everything wrong, but when I went in to collect the refund on JUL 25, 78 days in, owners say some pretty self incriminating stuff.
Tip top made the repair facility sound incompetent, yet when I went into the office for a refund, they couldn't even find my paperwork, tried to only give me back half the deposit paid, and lied about having my vehicle permit.
One of the owners began to shout at me from across the room. Don't think I ever spoke with her before. She explains that the reputation of their business is more important than me. She used 'we' statements to draw a division between us and promoted conflict, rather than resolution.
The two owners proceeded to commit three racial micro-aggressions in quick succession. 1) She said that they couldn't possibly be racist because of the dozen or so happy p.o.c. they have in pictures on their walls. 2) He said "I'm sorry you feel that way" to my feelings of being discriminated against, unapologetically condescendingly 3) And finally she said "because you called us racist, we didn't want to offer you another car."
I didn't call them racist, I told them how I felt. Also the timing doesn't add up with her statement because I had already stopped speaking with them at this point, so in essence she was admitting that their shop was stringing my grandmother along with promises of a fully repaired vehicle, but were punishing her because I had the audacity to complain about unfair treatment.
The company owners were just being defensive, no one asked WHY I felt discriminated against. They don't care. As a visible minority I'm perfectly content with never dealing with this business ever again, as an autistic person, I don't have time or energy for people making loud noises in my direction. AODA is a great first step, but businesses like these show that it is just a first step.
As a company your survival is based on how to adapt to problems like these. I would give this business and the owners a negative score if I could. I gave them a lot of opportunities to be what they promoted themselves as. The way they managed this sale collectively as a business, was atrocious!
In the end, we incurred a number of expenses for nothing, and just end up right back at square one after nearly 3 months. If we weren't advised to start paying insurance on the car already by the salesman, we would have backed out sooner than 78 days.
