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The problem for small shops is that so many cars require four-wheel alignments (bricks don't) and so many cars have wheels that don't lend themselves to clamp-on equipment, that the simple unit that I used 30 years ago won't work on lots of cars, and you can't afford to buy a big 4-wheel computerized unit and have it take up one of your bays unless you do alignments all day long.
I have a shop in Sacramento that I like. I use them for the few tasks that I cannot do on my Brick and 3 BMWs. Big enough to have appropriate tools, small enough that the owner recognizes me as a repeat customer, so he cares about my business. They farm out alignments and automatic transmission work to specialty shops. He suggested the second of the two shops I mentioned in my post. He preferred that I took the car there myself, because the small markup he gets when he takes a car there is not worth his time. However, I might have gotten better service if he had taken my car to the alignment shop because he is an important customer to them.
I should also mention, in both cases that I mentioned, I had my 18-year-old daughter (the primary driver of the car) take the car to the shop. They were pretty confident that she would not notice that they had done a "set the toe and let 'er go" alignment on the car.
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