Tire Shopping Tip!

Shway Lee
3 min readSep 10, 2023

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When you were told your tires thread are 4” or smaller, it’s time to shop new tires!

Picture credit: google discount tires online

This is my first time ever in life I had to shop new tires since my car had the original tires from manufacture. The original tires are Michelin. Have used it for 7 years and around 55k mileage.

I debated if I wanted big brands (Michelin, Bridge Stone, etc) or the brands i never heard about before. In the beginning I was gonna just go with random brands that give me 60–70k mileage warranty and fairly affordable options.

After I talked to my dad who I think is car expert coz he’s been working with trucks, cars, heavy machineries in his whole life so I trust his opinion quite abit. After I told him what I was thinking about the new tires, he was abit concerned. He said he prefers Michelin, Bridge stone, good year or Japanese brands such as Yokohama. He told me it’s worth to spend money on good tires to don’t have to worry for years.

So I decided to look into Michelin and Yokohama. I checked in with wholesalers (Costco in my case) and Walmart and Discount Tire. I do know there are a lot of locations for Discount Tire so in case I need to do tire rotation, flat tire or any need, discount tire having a lot of locations is very convenient. I compared the prices and honestly they all are similar for tire prices except how they charge for installation and etc.

So Costco told me there is a promotion happening for Michelin in September. I started shopping in August. I was told my tire thread is 4” back in June. I was like September is a great timing to change my tires. And honestly it turned out it is a good timing.

So Costco quoted me $811 for 4 tires after tax and everything during the promotion rebates. So I checked in with discount tires and they quote me for $990. So here is the point of this blog.

I went to discount tire and told them to “price match” and they were like do I have an invoice. Costco didn’t give me an invoice and we couldn’t look up the tire I was looking for at Costco website. So I call Costco and put it on speaker when they told me the price. Discount tire employee helped me price matched it and it was $810.38. Walah! Yet this includes 80k mileage warranty, lifetime repair, tire rotation, prorated warranty in case they can’t repair the tire.

I said it’s a great timing because by the time I went to Discount Tire, one of my tires is already at 1” so meaning it has no thread left. I didn’t have any flat tire so lucky me.

They finished installing my tires less than 2 hours and easy peacy!

So the moral of this is do the price match and just call the places to do this. And look up the tires ahead of time so that you are familiar with what you are looking for!

Good luck 🍀

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Shway Lee

Software Engineer by day — Explorer by night — Into all things around technology and humanity. I share some moments of my life through this.