I have had your experience generally, but not universally. I doubt I can succinctly say what I want to say about your comment. But I don’t think that employers have any sort of “pick of the crop” choices when it comes to employees.
Unfortunately, when it came to your tire situation the consequences for you were blowing off a day. The consequences for the employee who made the mistake, were “oops, sorry. My bad”.
I just went through something similar. I turned 65 in January of 19. October, November of 18 I am getting calls from insurance agents who want to sell me Medicare supplemental insurance. These were extensive phone calls, the guy I eventually bought from, I spent 45 minutes on the phone asking questions. I eventually settled upon a plan, part G. In all that time spent on the phone, the agent, whom I assume has sold five hundred, or a thousand of these policies, since he stated he had been working in the field for 20 years, never uttered the 20 word admonition “by the way you still have to go to your Social Security office and sign up for Medicare A and B”. As a result, my eligibility for Medicare was delayed by a year-and-a-half. There were no consequences, but I had I gotten injured or badly sick during that time, the consequences could have been massive.
If you and I are carpenters who work together, and have worked together 20 years, as far as I’m concerned, it is never ever wrong for me to say “be careful” when I see you climbing up a ladder. Even if I have seen you climb a ladder 5000 times.
Again, I don’t have a succinct summary of this dynamic. But it exists everywhere. When you buy something, you buy it complete with all its defects. And sometimes those defects can be catastrophic.
A friend of mine is the “person who knows what to do” at a Medicare help desk. There aren’t many of them