The vehicle that has never been aligned
Most alignment advice assumes an event: you hit something, so you book it. The commonest case in practice has no event attached to it at all.
A vehicle is bought, driven for years, has tires fitted two or three times, and is never measured. Nothing dramatic ever happened to it. What happened instead was ordinary: field entrances, ditch edges, gravel shoulders, an unmarked drop at the end of a driveway, and the slow settling of suspension components over a decade.
By then the owner has no baseline. The vehicle drives the way it has always driven, because the change happened across years, and the tire wear gets attributed to the brand of tire rather than to the geometry.
If you cannot remember an alignment on a vehicle you have owned a long time, that is itself the reason to have one measured. Not because something is necessarily wrong, but because nobody has ever established whether it is right.
What the measurement tells you even if nothing is adjusted
A set of readings against the manufacturer's specification is useful information on its own.
Within specification, you have ruled out alignment as the cause of whatever brought you in, and you have a baseline to compare against in three years. Outside it, you have found something that has been quietly costing you tires for longer than anybody noticed.
Ask for the before and after figures either way.
What alignment cannot fix
Worn components. A vehicle that will not hold an alignment has something moving under load, and that is suspension repair, done at this store, with the alignment afterwards.
The national alignment page covers the symptoms and the occasions worth booking for.
About this store
The Jonesboro store runs seventeen services, carries all nine Purcell tire categories, and is managed by Tony Kuehnel. It also aligns heavy trucks and trailers.
See the national car and light truck alignment page for all 40 locations.