Take 5 membership issue remains
Credit card cancellations, calls, bank disputes over never-ending charges
Every day for the past 10 days and counting, Julie Williams has stopped at Take 5 Car Wash in Waukesha after work to try to cancel her membership. But the doors are locked, and orange cones block the driveway.
“There’s no sign there or any indication that there’s something going on,” Williams said.
After Public Investigator published a story last week about a customer who couldn’t cancel his membership with Take 5 Car Wash, more than a dozen people in the Milwaukee metro area reached out to share similar frustrations.
Three of them said they resorted to canceling their credit or debit cards to stop the charges. A few said they pestered Take 5 for anywhere between a week to six months until their accounts were terminated. Others are still waiting for a resolution.
Meanwhile, the Waukesha location has been closed for the past 17 days and the Pewaukee location was recently closed for five days, with little explanation. Customers like Williams haven’t been able to cancel their memberships or use the car wash, yet are still being charged a membership fee.
“I just want to cancel the darn thing,” Williams said. “It’s frustrating.”
Former Take 5 Car Wash employees told Public Investigator that workers are quitting due to the influx of frustrated customers and lack of support from management. According to three local ex-employees, customers come in daily requesting to cancel their memberships, but employees are unable to assist.
“It’s a horrible company to work for,” said a former Take 5 Car Wash employee. “I feel absolutely horrible for the customers.”
The Journal Sentinel agreed not to name the ex-employees, who all left their positions in recent months, due to ongoing workplace matters they have with Take 5 that they fear could be jeopardized by speaking out.
Take 5 Car Wash, owned by Charlotte-based automotive company Driven Brands Inc., is the nation’s “largest express car wash operator.” It has more than 360 locations across the country, including at least 30 in Wisconsin.
Driven Brands spokesperson Devon Prince apologized to customers in an email on March 7.
“We understand that some customers have encountered difficulties making changes to their memberships,”
Prince said. “We deeply regret any inconvenience this has caused.”
Prince said the Waukesha location is closed due to “technology updates” and said Take 5 is compensating Waukesha members with a free one-month membership. He did not clarify if the company will reimburse members of the Pewaukee location.
Driven Brands did not respond to follow-up questions or agree to an interview.
For customers like Williams, the damage has been done.
“I’ll never use Take 5 again because of this experience,” Williams said.
Customers still seek resolutions
Williams said she has been trying to cancel her and her husband’s Take 5 Car Wash memberships since January.
According to Williams, her husband was told by employees at the Waukesha and West Allis locations that staff could not end the memberships. Instead, they recommended her husband cancel his credit card to stop the monthly $63.48 membership fee.
“It’s exactly to the T of the experience of your person that you wrote about in your (first) article,” Williams said. “But you shouldn’t have to do that. You should be able to cancel it easily.”
Throughout February, Williams said, she submitted four online cancellation forms and left at least four voicemails at Take 5’s main phone number.
Like the customer featured in the original article, Williams also tried entering her account numbers on the Take 5 website, but the site did not recognize her account. She suspects it is because her account was initially with Coast Car Wash and transferred over to Take 5.
“It doesn’t work,” Williams said. “You can’t talk to anyone. You can’t get anything done to cancel this membership.”
Like Williams, the customers who have had problems canceling their accounts were all originally members with Coast Car Wash, which was purchased by Take 5 in 2021.
Cobert Garb, a former customer of Coast Car Wash in Pewaukee, resorted to canceling his credit card twice to stop the charges from Take 5.
To make matters worse, Garb said he never agreed to a Take 5 Car Wash membership in the first place.
According to Garb, employees informed him last August that his Coast Car Wash membership was no longer valid. Garb said he paid for a final car wash in cash and assumed his membership was canceled when he wasn’t charged a fee that month.
But the charges came back. His bank statements show a $31.49 charge from Coast Car Wash in September and October. Then, from November 2023 to January 2024, Garb was charged $29.99 from Take 5 in addition to the monthly fee from Coast Car Wash.
Garb canceled the card and his credit card company reimbursed him for all of the charges, he said.
But come February, he was charged again, this time just by Take 5. Garb’s credit card company said since the membership is a standard subscription, it’s their practice to apply the charge to the new card. Garb again canceled the credit card.
“I’ll have to wait till March to see if it starts all over again,” Garb said.
Similarly, Mary Schwartz said she thought her membership was canceled in November last year, but her husband’s debit card continued to be charged monthly until February.
When Take 5 didn’t answer her emails, Schwartz disputed the charges with her bank and canceled the card.
“I don’t understand why you can’t talk to anybody,” Schwartz said. “It’s such a pain.”
Ex-employees cite company’s lack of responsiveness
Three former Take 5 Car Wash employees from the Waukesha, Pewaukee and West Allis locations said the reason former Coast Car Wash members seem to be having the most difficulty canceling their memberships has to do with Take 5’s transition to another payment processing software.
At the time Take 5 purchased the three Coast Car Wash locations, the company used a payment software called Innovative Control Systems, according to the former employees. But when Take 5 switched to a different payment processing software last spring, it didn’t terminate the old program, they said.
As a result, workers at these locations could not access memberships within the old system to cancel accounts, the former employees said.
Around the same time, Take 5 stopped allowing site managers to issue refunds, according to one ex-employee, who said workers were told to direct customers to the Take 5 Car Wash website.
But as customers have told Public Investigator, many don’t get a response from Take 5.
“So then eventually, the customer gets more frustrated and comes back to bite us,” a former employee said. “That’s where the dangerous part happens.”
The ex-employees said they have been spit on, cursed at and videotaped by frustrated customers.
One former employee estimated 20 customers came in each day over the summer complaining about the extra charges and difficulty canceling their memberships. Because management often scheduled just one worker per shift, the stress of handling these confrontations solo caused some to quit, the ex-employees said.
Some used Take 5 chatbot to cancel
In his statement last week, Prince, the Take 5 spokesperson, continued to recommend customers email takecare@ for “prompt assistance,” even though none of the people who reached out to Public Investigator have had luck with that route.
Prince did not answer questions about why customers are struggling to get responses from Take 5 or agree to further requests for an interview.
Instead, some frustrated customers have turned to the Take 5 customer service chatbot.
Jeff Scrobel said he used the chatline on March 4 and a representative followed up with him the next day. He was refunded $44.99 for his two memberships.
Justin Klug said he also used the chatbot and had to follow up just once, six days later, to get his account canceled. An added benefit of the chat feature, Klug said, is that it emails you a transcript, which is useful for disputing the charges with your bank if Take 5 doesn’t resolve the issue.
After speaking to Public Investigator and hearing that other customers had success using the chatline, Drew Lahr tried on March 11. The bot told him 10 minutes later that his cancellation request was submitted. Lahr received a cancellation confirmation email the next afternoon.
Before using the chatline, Lahr said, he emailed Take 5 several times and called more than 20 times over the past two months, to no avail.
Another route is to submit a consumer complaint to the state’s Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. Caleb Kulich, a spokesperson with the department, said filing a complaint increases the consumer’s chances of resolution.
Are Take 5 customers dealing with this nationwide?
“I’ll have to wait till March to see if it starts all over again.” Cobert Garb a former customer of Coast Car Wash in Pewaukee, canceled credit card twice
It’s unclear whether the issues with canceling Take 5 Car Wash accounts are widespread outside Wisconsin.
Take 5 Car Wash’s recent customer reviews on the Better Business Bureau are peppered with complaints from people who can’t cancel their memberships through customer service. However, the BBB doesn’t reveal where complainants are located.
The BBB rates Take 5 Car Wash an F — the lowest rating — with 442 complaints since it incorporated in 2015.
The BBB rates companies based on how the business interacts with customers and customer reviews. Take 5 Car Wash hasn’t responded to 26 complaints and hasn’t resolved 15 other complaints, according to the BBB website.
The Pewaukee, Waukesha and West Allis locations each have an F rating as well.
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