Aftermarket Shims?

First, a million thank you's to everyone who contributes to this forum. For the doubtless hundreds or thousands of us who lurk and learn, THANK YOU!

I recently had to go to the tire shop down the street because of a nail-in-tire situation (a screw had somehow wound up at the edge and a patch couldn't be done). In the process of filling it enough to limp into the tire place I noticed that one side of the tire was basically bald (27K miles, same tires as it had when I bought it) and the same was true of the rear tire on that side. I asked them to check the others and all four were essentially bald on one half of the tread.

The guy told me about the need for aftermarket shims to get the tires "really, truly aligned," as he put it, but quoted me $315 for the parts and labor. He acknowledged that labor is the vast majority of the price.

When I brought my '08 in for the recall on the gas pedal today, the service manager at the dealership shrugged off the question of whether the shims are necessary and said, "We did an alignment at 15,000 miles and there are no shim kits for an '08 Prius, so you've done everything you can."

I've read forum posts here on this topic and I know that there are aftermarket shim kits and the conventional wisdom is to get an alignment shop to do the installation and alignment rather than a tire shop but I'm not aware of any places in my area that only do alignment or that do alignment but do not sell tires.

I'm mainly looking to take the temperature on how much the installation and alignment generally costs. I confess that I suspect this dealership likes to rip people off to some degree so of course I'm pretty much ignoring their happy-go-lucky reaction to my tires only lasting for half their expected life. I'd like to go with the shims the tire place recommended, especially since I replaced the OEM tires with 80K-mile tires in hopes of not having to worry about this again anytime soon and I'd like to get all the life out of them I can, but $315 for the shim installation and alignment at the tire shop sounds like something of a rip-off, too.

Any recommendations?

 

Fred Anderson Toyota in Raleigh told me that there were no shim kits and that they would not shim the car. Hrm. Now I think I need to make some other calls...

Thanks!