Tires and Brakes

My car has been handling really poorly recently - it feels like I'm driving on ice, and it's making me an extremely tentative driver.  I haven't had new tires on my car since I bought it 5 years ago - they seem quite worn, so I took the day off today in order to get new tires fitted and hopefully run some other errands.  All the more important and timely to get this done with the wet weather we're currently having, and cold weather expected for this winter.  It's always a dilemma to know where to get this done and not feel exploited.  So I went to one of the big chains with good Yelp ratings.  After they first tried to sell me some top of the range expensive tires, I finally settled on the cheapest ones.  But a pre-inspection also revealed that I needed new front brakes.  This didn't come as much of a surprise, since again I haven't had new brakes since I got my car and they were definitely getting worse.  So this turned out to be a very expensive day.  I feel like I was ripped off, but I probably wasn't.  It was also a horribly time-consuming day - just fitting the tires would only take an hour or so, but with the brakes it meant I was without my car all day.  At least they offered a shuttle service to and from my home, but I didn't get my car back until late in the evening - scuttling some plans I had to go out tonight.  A bad day indeed.