Oh, i'm enjoying this, it's what happens when you assume your customers know no better and you are of the mentality to take advantage of them or the fact they may not know, not this customer mind he found you out.
All they needed to have said when you first mentioned the issue, ''please bring it in Mr Vicksburg we'll sort it out, sorry for any inconvenience, we'll make amends to you on the next service'' or something along those lines.
How to lose your customer's faith in one easy lesson, bravo.
As much as I love Mazdas (being an Mazda car owner of long standing) for their driving appeal and styling, unfortunately I cannot say the same about many of their main dealers, and on a fair number of cases (from reading accounts on Mazda owners' forums), Mazda UK.
IMHO, the dealership experience appears to be patchy at best (rather like Ford and Vauxhall, in my view) - most are better than average on the sale front, but quite variable in quality as regards post-sales.
Like the OP, many fellow Mazda owners have be treated disrespectfully at dealers for what often are minor gripes.inconveniences, which can easily lead to the customer taking their business elsewhere on maintenance once the warranty is up or to another make when they want to change cars - often the experience of using the car is normally very positive.
All this trouble just for not admitting an error immediately, apologising and making good at a relatively small cost in both monetary terms and goodwill (sometimes you get a positive for being promot and honest).
I think this is a significant part of the reason why sales of Mazdas have fallen off considerably compared to rival makes since their 'heyday' of the early-mid 2000s - owners liked the cars, not so much the dealership expreience. Mazda have a long history of innovative and stylish designs, but they need to learn a valuable lesson from the best in customer service from their peers, especially as being a smaller player means they are far more vunerable to customer services foul-ups than larger companies.
Oddly enough, from reading between the lines from reports from credible motoring journalists from North America and Down Under, it appears that a lot of how the dealership networks treat their customers is down to how the local branch of Mazda (e.g. Mazda UK) police their dealerships by enforcing a proper code of conduct.
From my own (minor) experience and mainly from anecdotal ones from others on Mazda owners' forums, Mazda UK are a very 'hand-off' operation and appear to leave dealerships to their own devices, rarely getting involved (to the benefit of the customer) in disputes.
Form those reports from the areas I mentioned, they appear to do a far better job and their local dealerships are much better regardsed by customers, leading to vastly higher sales (partly because sales of 'utility vehicles' is higher, but also because they offer a wider range of engines). In Australia, Mazda are second only to Toyota, but nearly twice as many as sold in the UK but with a vastly lower population. See what you can do when you look after customers well!
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