I had something like this happen at a local car wash, right here in McHenry-right next to Burger King. Long story short, the passengers side of my car had a big scratch all down the side of the car, starting at the front tire, going across the rim and down to almost the end of my door. It was a nice swirl like pattern, so it was pretty obvious where it came from.
When I went back 15 minutes later, the manager on the premises said, "We're not in the business of scratching cars". I keep my cars pretty meticulous and this was no exception. I pointed out that there were chips of paint still hanging off the car. The guy still denied scratching the car. I really got pissed off when the head Mexican told me (in broken english) it was probably a shopping cart. I was all like, "A SHOPPING CART....is that your standard answer for EVERY complaint? Go learn how to speak English and then try to explain to me how a shopping cart would have made marks up and down the side of my car?"
HERE is what I would do:
It IS illegal to cause a problem on their premesis. No business would want to have someone saying, "this place sucks" to their own customers. I would go online and go to Y!, Google etc. and fill out their free remarks thing and give them a $#!tty rating. Then, look for other people complaining about the same, or similar things. After you do this, copy all of these complaints and paste them to a word form. The more you find, the better...(obviously)
Now, if you go to...I don't know...lets say, the place right next door...I'm sure they wouldn't say anything if you put fliers on the cars in the lot-especially if you get thde heck out of Dodge before they even notice. I'm not sure if you sould include the picture of that rail and the back of your tire. I say that because if you are going to take them to court, this could look VERY bad for your case. When I did something similar to this, I was really surprised by how many people I knew, who had similar problems with the same establishment.
There is a Starbuck's right down the street from the place I had a problem with. When I distributed a few of my fliers (I did not take them to court, so I included pictures of my scratches-which did show up on black and white print mind you), I overheard a conversation between two women. One said she notioced change was missing from her ashtray. She couldn't prove it and she didn't know how much was missing....but it left her wondering. The other woman said she had some scracthes on her bumper that weren't there prior.
I didn't want to say anything to them, because I was kind of eavesdropping ontheir conversation, but it did make the bill to fix my car, not sting so much.