Aftermath Of Man Whose Rental Car Was Repossessed By Avis

by SharonKurheg

Some of you may have read the plight last week of Tarikh Campbell, the Teaneck New Jersey native who had rented an Avis rental car while visiting family back home. A graduate of MIT and instructor at Harvard, he walked out of his childhood home on August 14 and discovered the 2020 Toyota Camry he was renting from Avis at EWR was missing. That was the beginning of a bizarre story that Campbell shared on Twitter:

Yowsa, what a story!

Anyway, those were all posted on the morning of August 20th. His plight, of course, was retweeted a few thousand times and caught the attention of the likes of USA Today, Yahoo News and other news outlets.

By that evening, Avis had finally responded to Campbell:

Meanwhile, the Teaneck Police Department has assigned a detective to Campbell’s report and Campbell is even smart and thoughtful enough to ask the detective to expand the investigation:

Avis’ only response was that they were “investigating” the matter. However they did confirm that Campbell would indeed get a refund for his rental, and that’s an excellent thing.

Finally, 3 days later, they had something of an update:

I suppose it’s the happiest ending that could have been expected.

Feature Photo: Avis

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary

5 comments

Jack Darby August 28, 2021 - 6:24 am

And that, boys and girls, is why you should always rent a car using a card such as the Chase Sapphire Reserve that provides primary rental car coverage or use an American Express card and pay a couple of bucks for Amex Premium Car Rental Protection.

A couple of minutes of positive prior planning prevents a whole lotta piss-poor performance down the road.

The pros at Chase and Amex will make short work of car rental company blockheads’ silly song-and-dance routines when something like this happens.

Reply
DaninMCI August 28, 2021 - 7:07 am

It turned out OK for him but what if he hadn’t spent all that time complaining. I usually rent cars from National and Avis but this is not making want to use them in the future. That is for sure. How stupid could they be.

Reply
Jorge Paez August 28, 2021 - 5:16 pm

Isn’t is pathetic that it takes a public shaming on social media to get an errant companies 🙄 attention?
What a world…..

Reply
Jack Darby August 29, 2021 - 7:46 am

Shame, public or otherwise, has nothing to do with Avis’ actions to try “to make things right” since corporations have neither a soul nor a conscience.

Avis was simply applying cold, hard logic to a cost vs. benefit question; it cost Avis nothing to issue a few words of apology, refunding Mr. Campbell’s “additional costs” cost nothing and is a smart accounting move since that “revenue” was not earned and if a crop of similar instances came to the attention of Avis’ external auditors, Avis might have to deal with a bunch people that don’t take “sorry” as an excuse, such as regulators and ambitious attorneys and prosecutors.

As for returning Mr. Campbell’s personal property, that was just another “no cost” move; people with consciences and lawyers and prosecutors who, in the books of many, are held to lack that along with many other things, have a very simple term for the taking of others’ property: theft, for which even corporations can be prosecuted but, unfortunately, not jailed.

And as for Avis’ offering Mr. Campbell a future credit, just another cynical bottom-line calculation dressed in sheep’s clothing marketed with the foolish in mind to try and convince them that Avis is something more than just a corporation using a book full of fine print the size of ‘War and Peace’ to try and dig every last penny from their customers’ pockets.

And yes, I know all about how to use carriage returns and paragraphs to write readable replies but unfortunately WordPress never went to school.

Reply
Frederick Armayor August 29, 2021 - 10:26 am

Why did it take Avis officials so long to respond. Why? Did they hope it would just go away?

Reply

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