hattrick-appreciate your point of view. Thank you for dissecting my post and giving me the chance to strengthen my original position. Here is my response to you:

First of all I did not brand Enterprise as solely responsible for this potentially catastrophic event. You will notice that I also blamed the United States of America’s policy on hand guns. Maybe I should expand on this. Yes OBVIOUSLY we all realize that the previous renter is to be blamed for leaving the gun in the car in the first place. Don’t you think that Enterprise should take responsibility for letting the next customer FIND IT THERE?!?!?!?!! Have you ever rented a room in a hotel and found a loaded gun between the sheets? If you did, wouldn’t you blame the company’s cleaning staff and subsequently the management? I WOULD.

Furthermore, even though I argued training and underwriting procedures are part of the problem doesn’t mean I am necessarily blaming the company. I think the company could rent on a cash basis if it changed its underwriting guidelines to regulations. In fact the group I worked for did this. I am not sure if it had an impact on the group or not as I left not long afterwards. I do know the company’s motivation for changing the guidelines to rules was because there were too many cars being damaged by cash renters who purchased our collision damage waiver and the group was losing money on these deals. It shouldn’t take a drop in profits to acknowledge that employees do not always adhere to the guidelines. (before you start pointing out that companies have a right to take measures to keep their profits up and lower their costs, I agree with you and I’m not saying that the motivation shouldn’t be profits…but that it should also be incidences like the one described by the concerned parent who started this post) The countless stories on this site and other anti-E sites and the many customers who have written to Enterprise directly about their concerns should motivate the company to take a second look at its practices.

Another thing-and a view this entire site is based on-if Enterprise actually implemented the mottos, mission statement, and its own guidelines, it wouldn’t have all these problems. I am sure that it would be able to rent on a cash basis without having to worry so much about drug dealers, pimps and other shady characters taking advantage of the fact that yes there is a huge customer base that can’t or won’t rent with a credit card who Enterprise wants to serve. Managers are so pressured to make sure that a certain percentage of their fleet is on rent that they sometimes will take in the customer who doesn’t qualify 100% to rent on a cash basis.

Why hasn’t Enterprise done more to find out WHY this happened in the first place? Why hasn’t an investigation taken place? Why haven’t questions like “Who was in charge of cleaning cars at the time this customer rented the vehicle?” “Who checked the customer into the car?” “What kind of training has the car prep or other persons involved in cleaning cars at the time received” “What can we do to improve the preparation of our cars so that we can avoid this from happening in the future” If I were the parent who started this topic and discovered a LETHAL weapon in their rental car, I would be demanding that these answers be given. Whoever was cleaning cars that day should have been disciplined and put on probation and an incident report should have been written and the customer should have been reassured that the company is doing everything in its power to avoid this from repeating itself.

Ya I’ve made mistakes. There have always been consequences.

Ya the previous customer is responsible in some way. If it was a cop’s gun it would have a serial number on it and if anyone had been injured from it, that cop would get in SERIOUS trouble.

You would be surprised how many people turned out to be shady characters. I had many different managers. Because of our bad debt our branch was banned from being able to do cash rentals. Made renting cars sooooo much nicer. I had one manager who would NOT approve a cash rental unless the customer met every single requirement-we rarely had bad experiences with customers then because the bad ones never qualified. I have had managers who authorized rentals that did not meet all the requirements. During that time, there was definitely an increase in our cars having pot in them, used you know whats, accidents while under the influence, etc. THANK GOD no guns were found but of course I worked in Canada where many people have never seen a gun in real life. The only reason I have ever seen a gun is because my friend’s dad is a Mountie hahahaha


We all know the reality that it is VERY hard to find a good car prep so YA you need to keep on top of the training and discipline!! Children are assigned this task by parents…do you have kids? You do realize that when the “clean their room” they shove everything in the closet and under their beds? You do realize when they “clean the car” they are shoving everything under the seats?? Hahaha

Ya, it is a simple job though and anyone should be able to do it. BUT you can’t let the simplicity of the job determine the level of training. JUST LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENED and it isn’t just this once! Customers are ALWAYS finding stuff in the cars-you say you worked for Enterprise…you probably got very used to people finding stuff in cars and just shrugged it off after a while. Most of it is harmless stuff and can easily be overlooked but A GUN WAS FOUND LOADED, DUDE, do you not GET THAT?

Bottom line: mistakes happen…when they do, take ownership, find out why it happened, and make sure it never happens again…learn from your mistakes or count on your mistakes repeating themselves!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Again to the parent you posted the original message: please excuse the passiveness of the bottom management you were dealing with and the insensitive people who have posted here without addressing your main concern. Take this as high up as you need to go…and hope that it trickles back down to the thousands of branches who every day are renting to people who don’t even qualify to rent a car in the first place.